a greater attention to things

Renowned abstract painter and IU alumna Samia Halaby discusses the development of her practice during her time in Bloomington, as well as her computer art and its relationship to her painting.

Samia A. Halaby is a Palestinian artist and scholar who lives and works in New York. Born in Jerusalem in 1936 during the British Mandate, today she is recognized as one of the Arab world’s leading contemporary painters. Halaby received her bachelor of science in Design from the University of Cincinnati and graduated from Indiana University with a masters in fine art in 1963. She went on to teach art at the university level for seventeen years, a decade of which was spent as an associate professor at the Yale School of Art, where she was the first woman to hold the position of associate professor. She also taught at the University of Hawaii, Michigan State University, the Kansas City Art Institute, and Indiana University. Since beginning her artistic career in the early 1960s, she has exhibited in galleries, museums, and art fairs throughout the US, Europe, Asia, and South America. Her work is housed in private and public collections around the world.

After nearly 60 years of identifying the essentials of abstraction, the prolific Samia Halaby is considered to be a trailblazer in contemporary abstract art internationally. In her renowned paintings—which have been collected by international museums since the 1970s—Halaby draws inspiration from nature and historical movements such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avante-garde.
 
Displaced from Palestine in 1948 with her family when she was eleven, Halaby was educated in the American Midwest at a time when abstract expressionism was popular but female abstract painters were marginalized.
 
Halaby believes that new approaches to painting can transform our ways of seeing and thinking, not only within aesthetics, but also as a way to discover new perspectives for advances in teaching, technology, and society at large. This conviction has inspired her to pursue additional experiments in drawing, printmaking, computer-based kinetic art, and free-from-the-stretcher painting.
 
Her work has exhibited in galleries and is housed in private collections throughout the world. Halaby is collected by many museums such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art (New York and Abu Dhabi); Cleveland Museum of Art; Institut du Monde Arabe; and Birzeit University (Ramallah). She is represented by Ayyam Gallery (Beirut and Dubai).
 
Interest in Halaby’s work has grown significantly over the past decade within the Arab and Western art scenes, as her paintings both expand the tradition of Islamic geometry and modern painting, and introduce non-western contributions to modernism in New York and London.
 
In addition to her prolific career as an artist, Halaby is also heralded as an innovative thinker, educator, and activist. Halaby’s writings on art history, pedagogy, and aesthetics have appeared in numerous publications over the last three decades. Her 2002 survey, Liberation Art of Palestine, is a seminal text of Palestinian art history. Halaby has published two books within the past year: Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre—recipient of a 2017 Palestine Book Award—and Growing Shapes: Aesthetic Insights of an Abstract Painter. As an educator, Halaby introduced a groundbreaking undergraduate studio art program to art departments throughout the Midwest, and was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art for nearly a decade. A New York-based advocate, Halaby has also been organizing for causes concerning class, race, and Palestine since the 1970s.
 
When she steps away from the galleries and international art shows, Samia retreats to her TriBeCa studio, where she enjoys pretending that she is a recluse in a cave, or a lone sailor in a deep submarine. She has been known to emerge from her studio (typically after 6pm) to drag any and all willing participants to her favorite Thai restaurant down the street. In addition to her substantial art world following, Samia has fun interacting with her budding following on Instagram.

Samia Halaby: Eye Witness follows Samia Halaby’s (b. Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, 1936) creative journey to experiment with the ways painting conveys her experiences and reflects how she sees the world around her. Halaby’s paintings, which range from miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D, and monochrome to multicolor, are notably shaped by her experiences, and shift accordingly throughout her itinerant career across the Midwest, the East coast, and the Arab world. As a self-described painter of her time, Halaby also explores how technology can enhance and transform painting. Her experimentations thus render new approaches to capturing ephemeral moments. Halaby’s paintings reflect a life of witness, one we are invited to take part in by looking slowly and closely at the artist’s work.

The origins of Halaby’s painterly trajectory are rooted right here in Michigan State University. From 1959 to 1960, Halaby attended MSU and earned her MA. It was at MSU that she began painting in earnest with oil on canvas, first making textural, abstract paintings filled with vibrant fields of color. Her earliest teachers were American abstract painters like Ralf Henricksen, John de Martelli, and Charles Pollock, against which Halaby crafted her own artistic voice. After leaving MSU, Halaby received her MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1963. She later returned to Michigan and taught at the University of Michigan from 1967–69, where the spaciousness of her studio in the nearby town of Dexter allowed her to make larger paintings—a immense scale that now defines her work.

Eye Witness will be Halaby’s first return to MSU since her graduation over sixty years ago, and will feature some of the paintings she made during her time here. As the first ever American survey of her work, we invite you to join us as we pay homage to one of the most important and prolific painters of a generation, and an esteemed MSU alumna.

Samia Halaby: Eye Witness is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Rachel Winter, Assistant Curator, with support from Thaís Wenstrom, Curatorial Research and Administrative Assistant, and Laine Lord, Museum Practicum Student and Curatorial Intern. This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Eli and Edythe Broad Endowed Exhibitions Fund.

MSU BROAD ART MUSEUM and ESKENAZI MUSEUM OF ART 
to present SAMIA HALABY RETROSPECTIVES IN 2024

The exhibitions will span over 60 years of Halaby’s artistic career. 

Instagram posts by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert sharing key moments from the Samia Halaby exhibition development and post-cancellation journey. 

Learn more from Samia Halaby's Instagram account (linked in catalogue)

Instagram posts by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert sharing key moments from the Samia Halaby exhibition development and post-cancellation journey. 

Learn more from Samia Halaby's Instagram account (linked in catalogue)

Instagram posts by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert sharing key moments from the Samia Halaby exhibition development and post-cancellation journey. 

Learn more from Samia Halaby's Instagram account (linked in catalogue)

Instagram posts by Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert sharing key moments from the Samia Halaby exhibition development and post-cancellation journey. 

Learn more from Samia Halaby's Instagram account (linked in catalogue)

Digital Art Seminar Activity: Shawn Bailey generating a visual identity for the virtual exhibition space

This parts are from different Halaby paintings rearranged to feel like architecture 

This parts are from different Halaby paintings rearranged to feel like architecture 

This parts are from different Halaby paintings rearranged to feel like architecture 

Digital Art Seminar Research: Michelle Camacho's photographic studies of Samia Halaby's print works

Digital Art Seminar Research: Michelle Camacho's photographic studies of Samia Halaby's print works

Digital Art Seminar Research: Michelle Camacho's photographic studies of Samia Halaby's print works

Digital Art Seminar Research: Michelle Camacho's photographic studies of Samia Halaby's print works

Digital Art Seminar Activity: generating title ideas from close readings of Samia Halaby's essay, "My History with Digital Art"

Digital Art Seminar Activity: Melody Reyes generating a visual identity for open call communications

Digital Art Seminar Activity: Melody Reyes generating a visual identity for exhibition marketing

Digital Art Seminar Activity: Melody Reyes generating a visual identity for exhibition marketing

Digital Art Seminar Activity: Elsie Edwards generating a visual identity for open call communications

Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as cultural logic. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015.

Miriam Sturdee, Makayla Lewis, Angelika Strohmayer, Katta Spiel, Nantia Koulidou, Sarah Fdili Alaoui, and Josh Urban Davis. 2021. A Plurality of Practices: Artistic Narratives in HCI Research. In Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (C&C '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 35, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450741.3466771

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on Societies of Control" in October: The Second Decade, 1986-1996. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. Tantor Media, 2021.

"Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy" exhibition catalogue