Samia Halaby
Samia Halaby (b.1936 in Jerusalem) is a Palestinian-American artist, and scholar living and working in New York. Halaby is a painter who was educated in the 1950s in the American Midwest, at a time when abstract expressionism was popular. While her work is very much in line with American art movements she evolved with, it is consciously enriched by the history of pictorial expression worldwide. Her oeuvre is today central to the study of abstraction within both global and Arabic visual language.
In over six decades Halaby has produced an immense body of work and is a very particular, innovative figure within her generation of artists. As an independent scholar she has contributed to the documentation of Palestinian art of the twentieth century and her writings on art history, pedagogy, and aesthetics have appeared in numerous publications. As an educator, she introduced a groundbreaking undergraduate studio art program to art departments throughout the Midwest and was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art for nearly a decade.
In 2025, she was honoured the MUNCH Award for artistic freedom. In 2024, the jury of the Biennale Arte in Venice awarded Halaby a Special Mention in recognition of her longstanding work.
Her work is in the collections of MoMA, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Art Jameel Jeddah/Dubai; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; among many others.
Bird Dog
1987
3:40 min
Land, 1988
1:20 min
Kinetic paintings programmed on an amiga computer, sound
Lighthouse, 1993/2025
6:17 min
The RED CANARY and the grey spider, 1993/2025
2 min
Kinetic paintings produced using the Kinetic Painting Program coded on a PC with a Windows operating system, sound by Kevin Nathaniel and Hasan Bakr
Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut / Hamburg
Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a leading figure of contemporary abstraction and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Her digitally-generated kinetic abstractions are grounded in an approach to painting as a temporal experience, where shifting shapes and forms can expand our ways of seeing and thinking.
Composed on a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer in her home in New York City in 1988, Bird Dog and Land are animated works of movement and sound using simple computation instructions. They behave like evolving fields, in which shapes gradually shift, expand, and return. Here, movement, space and time are interdependent concepts, creating a sense of seeing while in motion. Halaby’s practice often draws on nature and historical movements, such as early Islamic architecture and the Soviet avant-garde. In her work Land, iterative expansion and contraction extend into occupation, as forms grow into, edge over, and against one another, evoking shifting territories and control. The artist describes Land as being dedicated to her homeland of Palestine, from which she was exiled during the Nakba, the mass displacement of Palestinians that started in 1948.
This concern continues in the later works such as Lighthouse and. Created using Halaby’s own Kinetic Painting Program, developed specifically for her practice, the pieces use pulsating structures and melodic sounds to suggest a beacon-like rhythm of emergence and dissolution. Interlocking chromatic systems, Halaby stages an encounter between fragile and predatory forms. Painting becomes a lived field where computation, perception, and political space unfold as continuous becoming and site of possibility.