36 Facts About Samia Halaby

Samia A Halaby was born on 1936 and is a Palestinian-American visual artist, activist, educator, and scholar.

Samia Halaby's work is housed in public and private collections around the world, including the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe, and the Palestinian Museum.

Samia Halaby's work was included in the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Samia Halaby received her academic training in the US midwest, and was active in American academia, teaching art at the university level for over 20 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.

Samia Halaby taught at the University of Hawaii, Indiana University, the Cooper Union, the University of Michigan, and the Kansas City Art Institute.

Samia Halaby has long been an activist and in 2019 endowed the Samia A Halaby Foundation to support working-class and Palestinian liberation movements.

Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936, during the British Mandate of Palestine.

Samia Halaby is the daughter of Asaad Halaby and Foutonie Atallah Halaby.

Samia Halaby was referred to as "the encyclopedia of the family".

Samia Halaby retains vivid visual memories of her life in Palestine, especially of the trees and leaves in her grandmother Maryam Atallah's garden in Jerusalem.

Samia Halaby's family fled to Lebanon, residing in Beirut until 1951, when they eventually settled in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Samia Halaby has designed dozens of political posters and banners for various anti-war causes, and is featured in the publication The Design of Dissent.

Samia Halaby's "Kinetic Painting Group" toured extensively in the late 1990s, and video works continue to be shown across the world.

Samia Halaby examined Rembrandt and his use of light and color in portraiture, and was particularly impressed with the Old Master collection at the Kansas City Museum.

Samia Halaby was then teaching at the Kansas City Art Institute and leading a boldly experimental program for first-year students.

From her thorough education at the University of Cincinnati, Samia Halaby understood the failures of perspective.

Samia Halaby wanted to know exactly what it is we see when our eye travels over the surface of a spherical or cylindrical object, reaches the edge and then jumps to a far background.

Samia Halaby felt that she could explore one of two directions, either focus on the individual and the self or life outside.

Samia Halaby tested the first direction by doing a portrait of a friend but quickly decided to embrace the latter.

Samia Halaby interpreted the idea of life outside the self as painting that expands its content outside the frame.

Samia Halaby had been wondering to which direction the diagonal horizons of her new paintings should lean.

In 1979, Samia Halaby felt that she had reached the end of the Diagonal Flight series.

In essence, Samia Halaby explains, it was essentially a continuation of seeing but with the addition of the fourth dimension of time.

Samia Halaby's focus on the cells between veins in autumn leaves and their similarity to city blocks that she knew in New York connected together formed basis for this series.

At that time Samia Halaby lived in New York and commuted to New Haven while teaching at the Yale School of Art.

Samia Halaby noticed that human building was dominated by the right angle, but that in the growth of highways and city blocks those right-angled rectangles were often disturbed and thus truncated by the necessities imposed by natural land formations.

Samia Halaby determined that her paintings, to be as beautiful as nature, had to grow according to principles extracted from nature.

Samia Halaby began to allow lines and shapes to actively change each other.

Samia Halaby was beginning to find her way through a new way of seeing and a new way of making abstract paintings, one that imitates the principles of nature not its appearance.

Samia Halaby's work became more apparent in freely moving gestures and her more generally more intuitive in execution while her ideas remained strongly structures.

Early in 1990, Samia Halaby reviewed her entire practice and concluded that it was time to create space in the painting, relying only on brush marks as the building blocks of the work.

Samia Halaby often talked about how our eyes shift focus from place to place while we walk and examine our surroundings.

Over a long and fertile career, Samia Halaby has always kept the picture plane and its perimeter in focus as a primary compositional player.

In 2024, Samia Halaby was scheduled for her first retrospective in the United States at Indiana University Bloomington's Eskenazi Museum of Art, but the show was cancelled in December 2023.

Samia Halaby has lectured widely on the subject in galleries and universities throughout the US and in venues in the Arab world.

Samia Halaby actively assisted the curators in researching Palestinian artists, both in the US and the Arab world, introducing them to such artists as the late Mustapha Hallaj in Syria and Abdul Hay al Mussalam in Jordan, for example.