Samia Halaby is a painter, writer and activist for Palestine. Halaby was 12 when her family was driven out of their home in Jaffa. As refugees, her family sought refuge in Lebanon, and then Cincinnati. After pursuing her MFA at Indiana University in Bloomington, USA, Halaby became the first full-time female professor at the Yale School of Art.
Now in the middle of her sixth decade as an active painter exploring abstraction and its relationship to reality, she relies more on intuition than on planning. Her central medium during the first three decades was oil and later acrylic. Within the parameters of her ideas, Halaby explored the digital medium by programming kinetic abstractions with sound beginning in the mid 1980s.
Her work is in museums and private collections internationally, among others: The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA; The British Museum, London, UK; The Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA; The National Museum of Jordan, Amman, Jordan; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., USA; Yale University Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Halaby’s one-artist shows include Arab, European and American galleries. Halaby authored a book titled the “Liberation Art of Palestine” for which she interviewed fourty-six artists. A second book is in the pipeline titled “Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre.” In it she explains the drawings she made on the subject and includes the dozens of witness interviews she conducted and translated and on which she based the drawings. She is the subject of two monographs and numerous reviews.
Samia Halaby now lives and works in New York, U.S.A.
