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).

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Artist Press

Abstraction Toute, arearevue)s( Issue 19  September 2009

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Samia Halaby at the Ayyam Gallery, What's On  May 2008

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Artist Exhibitions

Levant Summer  4 Jul - 15 Aug, 2009
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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 Halaby
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Ayyam Editions

Samia Halaby
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Selected Works

SAH71 Samia HALABY 'Munir' 122 X 147 cm. Acrylic on Canvas 2008 LOCATION: BEIRUT

SAH38(649) Samia HALABY 'Purple Nest' 145 X 180 cm. Acrylic on Linen Canvas 2007 LOCATION: DUBAI, DIFC

SAH47(657) Samia HALABY 'Through to Light' 153 X 204 cm. Acrylic on Linen Canvas 2008 LOCATION: DUBAI

SAH53(529) Samia HALABY 'Cross Currents' 107 X 122 cm. Oil on Linen Canvas 1999 LOCATION: DAMASCUS

SAH61(414) Samia HALABY 'Play Ground' 132 X 137 cm. Acrylic on Canvas 1986 LOCATION: DAMASCUS

SAH7 Samia HALABY 'Blue Brick' 92 X 122 cm. Oil on Linen Canvas 1980 LOCATION: DAMASCUS