Samia Halaby
Biography
Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby is a leading Palestinian painter and scholar. After immigrating to the US via Lebanon in 1951, she obtained a Bachelor of Science in Design from the University of Cincinnati in 1959 and a Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University in 1963. Shortly after, she began an extensive career of teaching art at universities throughout the US, which culminated in a ten-year position as the first fulltime female associate professor at the world-renowned Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Although based in New York, Halaby has also worked in the Arab world, teaching at such foremost institutions as Birzeit University in the West Bank and Darat al Funun in Amman, Jordan.
Since 1970, she has held countless solo exhibitions, both in the US and abroad and has been featured in a number of groundbreaking exhibitions of Arab art, such as "Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. (1994) and "Made in Palestine" at the Station Museum of Art in Houston, Texas (2003). Her large abstract canvases have had successful sales at auctions throughout the Middle East.
Halaby's work is housed in several museum collections worldwide, most notably the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, The British Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Detroit Institute of Art. As an art historian, she has been instrumental in curating several exhibitions in the US, while her many years of researching and writing led to the publishing of Liberation Art of Palestine (2002), one of the few English-language books on contemporary Palestinian art available today.
Although her exceptional style of painting has changed dramatically over the years—from large canvases exploring the color planes of geometric and helix formations to colorist assemblages that speak of movement and nature—she has continued to push the boundaries of art for over forty years. As a result, she is recognized as a major contributor to the school of abstraction in Arab art. Halaby's vivid canvases have been praised in a number of leading American publications including The New York Times and Art in America, while her exhibitions in the Arab world have been reviewed by Al Nahar and The Daily Star. In 1983, she created a computer program for kinetic paintings, an aspect of her oeuvre that resulted in several audio-visual presentations, including a tour of Syria, Palestine and Jordan and a performance accompanied by live musicians at New York's Lincoln Center (1998).
Artist Press
Abstraction Toute, arearevue)s( Issue 19 September 2009Download PDF (3.5 MB)
Samia Halaby at the Ayyam Gallery, What's On May 2008
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Artist Exhibitions
Levant Summer 4 Jul - 15 Aug, 2009View Exhibition
Stories From the Levant, Tammam Azzam, Samia Halaby, Nadim Karam 22 Jan - 14 Feb, 2009
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Samia Halaby, Solo Exhibition 5 May - 22 , 2008
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Artist Publications
Samia HalabyView Publication
Ayyam Editions
Samia HalabyView Edition
Selected Works
SAH36 Samia HALABY 'Light Between' 152 X 204 cm. Acrylic on Linen Canvas 2007 LOCATION: DUBAI
SAH70 Samia HALABY 'Pre Dawn Abu Dhabi' 122 X 168 cm. Acrylic on Linen Canvas 2008 LOCATION: DUBAI
SAH42 Samia HALABY 'Wild Prarie in Autumn' 145 X 122 cm. Acrylic on Linen Canvas 2008 LOCATION: DUBAI
SAH71 Samia HALABY 'Munir' 122 X 147 cm. Acrylic on Canvas 2008 LOCATION: BEIRUT
SAH7 Samia HALABY 'Blue Brick' 92 X 122 cm. Oil on Linen Canvas 1980 LOCATION: DAMASCUS
SAH8 Samia HALABY 'Marble' 92 X 122 cm. Oil on Linen Canvas 1980 LOCATION: DAMASCUS
SAH19 Samia HALABY 'Night Seeing' 168 X 229 cm. Oil on Linen Canvas 1980 LOCATION: DAMASCUS
SAH39 Samia HALABY 'Relativity of Light & Dark' 120 X 145 cm. Acrylic on Linen Canvas 2008 LOCATION: DAMASCUS