Halaby is mostly known for her exuberant abstract paintings, which have found homes in private and public collections around the world, from the Guggenheim Museum to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institut du Monde Arabe to the Barjeel Art Foundation, to name a few. Based in New York, Halaby developed a career for herself, in painting and teaching, in her adopted home of the United States.
Samia Halaby, Silver Section, 1969, from The Samawi Collection
But it came at a cost. Because of the 1948 war, the Halaby family moved from their homeland to America. Halaby was reportedly just 12 years old. Leaving Palestine behind, with all its natural scenery, abundance of olive trees, and historical landscapes, has surely made an impact on her life and art until this day. “My commitment to Palestine is permanent. It’s part of me," she once claimed. "I lived through my father and mother and their generation being torn apart."
She is also a scholar, publishing a book nearly two decades ago on Palestinian painting during the second half of the 1900s. Entitled "Liberation Art of Palestine," Halaby focused on its revolutionary essence, drawing parallels with other groundbreaking art movements such as Mexican muralism and European futurism, demonstrating artists' fight through art.
From the 1990s until 2012, Halaby herself produced a compelling series of drawings about the 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre. It resulted in the killing of more than 40 unarmed Palestinians, returning to their homes from work, unaware of an imposed curfew. Based on interviews with a historian and survivors, Halaby gave the work a "documentary" feel, aiming to "represent its events as though I were a camera on site," she previously said.
But, in the end, abstraction proved to be her dominant language on canvas. On large pieces, she takes the viewer into a mesmerizing realm of colors, forms, and gestural strokes, intertwined in a dance, where everything falls into place. An art historian at heart, she admires Islamic geometry, Russian avant-garde, the Italian Renaissance, as well as Impressionism.
Halaby was raised in the Midwest during the 1950s, a time when Abstract Expressionism was on the rise in the United States. The prolific likes of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko led the movement. Women artists, such as Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, were active too, but didn't receive the same recognition as their male counterparts.
As a student at the University of Cincinnati, she studied design and later gained a Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University. A true and longtime academic, Halaby taught at a number of US universities, including the University of Hawaii, University of Michigan and Yale School of Art, where she reportedly became its first full-time female associate professor. She was also teaching regionally, in institutions like Birzeit University and Jordan's Darat al Funun.
Looking at Halaby's extensive oeuvre, there is a clear evolvement in her aesthetics and style of painting. In her early geometric work, such as "Silver Section" from 1969, there is a visually attractive sense of rigidness, sharpness, precision, and implementation of cold hues. But as the years went on, a freer spirit emerges in her lively and fluid compositions, shimmering with yellows, pinks, blues, and full of juxtaposed shapes, as seen in 2004's "Outside Inside."
According to a 2013 article published by Harper's Bazaar Art Arabia, Halaby's abstract images have been largely inspired by memory and visual perception. With a keen eye, she observes her surroundings and is captivated by what she sees – even the smallest of things. "When I see something beautiful, I always stop and memorize it," she previously claimed. "I watch things change relative to each other in shape, size, and color and these memories become the subject of my paintings."
At times, her kaleidoscopic paintings represent intimate moments of her day, expressed imaginatively in a juxtaposition of overlapping cubes and rectangles. Whether it be a sunset in the Jordan valley, the shimmering gold of the Dome of the Rock, a scene of intense flurrying of snow, she has created a world of her own, and we're invited to see with her. “The fact that you come to the painting and see something in it — no matter what you see — only makes me feel better,” she said in an interview with Arab News in 2022.
Aside from painting, Halaby has tried her hand in other forms of art, such as printmaking, works on paper, sculpting, and computer-based kinetic art in the 1980s. Her work has been exhibited in a wide range of regional and international venues, including the Palestine Museum, the Singapore Biennale, and Beirut Exhibition Center. It seems that in Dubai she has found a new audience of admiring art students and collectors, mostly caused by the support of Ayyam Gallery, which regularly showcases her early and new pictures at its UAE gallery space, as well as art fair participations.
As an octogenarian, Halaby continues to work in her TriBeCa studio at her own pace. During the pandemic, she gave online talks. On her Instagram account, she posts from time to time images she's working on, inviting followers to give their feedback. As evidenced by her earlier work, she embraces technology. Even after all these years, she seems to have something to look forward to. "Absolutely, you keep learning,” she told me last year in an interview. “If you stop learning, you’re repeating yourself; it becomes a performance, and at what point does that become boring?”
