Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936. She is an abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art.
Halaby and her family were expelled from their home in Jaffa in 1948 with the creation of the illegal Israeli state. They fled to Lebanon where they stayed until 1951 and they traveled to the United States.
In 1959, she 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. Shortly after she went on to hold her first academic teaching position at the Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. In 1966, she returned to the Arab world for the first time since being exiled for a long tour of Palestine, Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, where she researched Islamic architecture and geometric abstraction as part of a Faculty Development grant from the Kansas City Art Institute. Since that time, she has worked hard and her visits have resulted in a number of developments in her work: paintings, drawings and a special documentary entitled “The Kafr Qasem Drawings”.
Recognised as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world, although based in the United States since 1951, she has exhibited throughout the region and abroad and is widely collected by international institutions.
Based in New York since the 1970s, she has long been active in the city’s art scene, mainly through independent and non-profit art spaces and artist-run initiatives, in addition to participating in leftist political organizing for various causes. She has long been an advocate of pro-Palestinian struggles.
Halaby primarily works in abstraction but has also designed dozens of political posters and banners for various anti-war causes. Her work differs from figurative and direct images relating to Palestine. Some of her Paintings, varied with colorful features of abstract images of flowers ad landscapes, resonate with her Palestinian roots.
Her approach to abstraction has ranged from works exploring the visual properties of the geometric still life to free-form paintings in the form of collaged pieces of canvas that are joined to create larger abstractions that are free from the stretch. As of 2012, her oeuvre contained over 3,000 works, including paintings, three-dimensional hanging sculptures, artist books, drawings, and limited edition artist prints.
Due to her recognition in both the contemporary Arab art scene and in the US-based activist community, Halaby has been the subject of a number of art works by other artists. The 2008 film “Samia” by Syrian filmmaker and conceptual artist Ammar Al Beik was created around a taped interview of the artist that was commissioned by Ayyam Gallery, Dubai. In the film, Al Beik includes Halaby’s own footage of a trip to the West Bank in which she narrates her stay there and later documents a trip to her grandmother’s apartment in Jerusalem.
She has contributed to the documentation of Palestinian art of the twentieth century through such texts as her 2001 book, “Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Painting and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century” (H.T.T.B. Publications.
In the early 2000s, she was instrumental in the landmark exhibition “Made in Palestine,” which was organized by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston.
The 2004 exhibition “The Subject of Palestine,” which Halaby curated for the DePaul Art Museum.
Samia Halaby´s work
–Veteran Palestinian artist Samia Halaby speaks to MEMO on Palestinian art and activism
– On “Liberation Art” and Revolutionary Aesthetics: An Interview with Samia Halaby
– Q&A: Samia Halaby on Painting and Palestine
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