Biography: Samia A. Halaby

July, 1996

Samia Halaby has been living in her present studio for the past twenty years. It is in an old building in the heart of Tribeca in New York city. She is the third artist to live in her loft space which once was a welding shop in this the garment district. Paintings, drawings, books, and note papers occupy the walls, shelves, and table tops. They give this garage like space its flavor. In the corner of the studio is an older computer on a desk heaped with books, papers, CDs, and diskettes. Similarly accompanied, a second newer computer sits in a corner of her living room which serves as an extension of the studio.

She spends her time traveling, painting, writing on art, and teaching. In her youth she visited the museums and architectural monuments of Europe and the Arab World. Now she travels mostly to attend electronic art conferences where ever they take place and she also travels as visiting artists to the Arab World where she has some of her warmest most fascinating friends. Earlier in her life she was a professor of art at many distinguished American Universities. In recent years she has been organizing events of poetry and painting at her loft. In this she finds intellectual stimulation which replaces teaching.

Samia was born on December 12, 1936, in the city of Jerusalem in Palestine. She is the third offspring and first daughter of Asaad Saba Halaby and his wife Foutounie Abdelnour Atallah At the time of her birth and during her childhood Jerusalem was entirely an Arab city. Israeli encroachments had not yet destroyed its delightful flavor. She can still see in her mind's eye the beauty of Jerusalem even through the thick layer of Israeli aggression and terrorism. "In my memory there is a shape like a candle flame, luminescent but cooler in color and warm to the touch. This is the very shape which visually forms in my mind as the aggregate of my memories of Jerusalem. It is made up of grandmothers, visiting relatives, wonderment at fountains in gardens of fruits and blossoms, the turn of a narrow street, the old city walls and shops, the calm and peace of its people, the stone arches and domes of an old bakery, the grand uncle in his shoe repair shop, the vegetable seller on his donkey, and the modern burgeoning new neighborhoods with beeping cars and bustling shops. I remember the persuasion that we lived here in our Jerusalem at the wellsprings of culture. And truthfully, even though a lot of people these days do not like to hear it, next to this lovely shape is another one which is made up of lead gray blotchy burnt small shapes buzzing about like nasty bees. This is the aggregate of my memories of the Israelis"

She began dedicating her time to painting during her first years at graduate school at Michigan State University where she studied with Abstract Expressionist painters who visited the school from New York. As a result of this, like many other art students of the period, she began to think of moving to New York. It was 1960 and the idea was daunting. She decided first to develop her work as she accepted teaching positions. Teaching was then the only way to earn money with an art education.

It was not till 1976 that she finally moved to New York. During this 16 year detour she lived in five different cities continuing to paint actively while teaching. Her professorial career ascended from lesser known art schools to culminate in a position at the countries most distinguished school. She followed this seeming inexorable path of bourgeois success finding along the way that the most distinguished school and its most distinguished professors were in fact less than their less distinguished counterparts. Eventually in mutual antipathy and after ten years of teaching Yale terminated her tenure. By then she had moved to New York and had been living there for six years. Thus without relocation she found that her teaching career had smoothly fulfilled her wishes and left her a practicing artist free of full-time teaching in the city considered to be the world's center of painting.

Though the shift from teacher to artist had not entailed relocation it did involve a serious mental and intellectual strain as Samia Halaby decided to accept the advice of friends and fight the University's unethical termination and treatment. This resulted in an interesting exhibition at the 22 Wooster gallery titled "ON TRIAL: The Yale School Of Art."

Her painting activity includes several media such as oil painting, encaustic, acrylics and several drawing media as well as computer. In 1986 after returning from her exhibition in Grenada, Spain, she decided to investigate the computer as a medium. She was interested in it as a medium and not an electronic mode to prepare ideas for oil painting. Now she pays a great deal of attention to the notion of not using the computer to imitate photography or animation or oil painting.

For many years, even before moving to New York, she tried to establish a good relationship with an art dealer and had only a little success. Her favorite was Marta Santos-Lourdes who operated the Tossan-Tossan Gallery. Marta being of Basque origin and Samia being of Palestinian origin both found common emotions in the traditions of struggle and resistance of their respective national origins. Further Marta was the first dealer Samia had met whose interest in being a dealer had more substance than mere fashionable petite bourgeois merchandising. Samia A. Halaby's relationship with New York dealers was always aggravated beyond the normal antithesis of artist to dealer by the Zionist political persuasion of most New York dealers as well as the social ambiance of chauvinism in this city.

Among the huge number of artists from all over the world who live in New York are numerous groupings of varied intellectual and political persuasions. artists of a layer which might be called "the minorities underground" is something she claims is the best part of living in New York. She claims that their unfavorable position in this chauvinist ambiance gives them clearer vision and thus makes them better artists. This contact started during the years when she helped to run the 22 Wooster Gallery. 22 Wooster was run by a small group of artist on a voluntary basis. These artists curated shows and helped organize committees of artists to sponsor exhibitions independently of the commercial gallery scene. As an enthusiastic group of artists and art lovers developed around the gallery disagreement erupted among the gallery members. Halaby wanted the gallery to be totally independent of establishment critics and curators while others wanted the gallery to be a showcase stepping stone to success.

It was at the 22 Wooster Gallery that she and a group of students and workers organized the unusual exhibition which put the Yale School of art on trial. The show included posters made by workers at the University in the struggle to win a union. Connected to the show was a series of performance events. The show received substantial critical attention and was the beginning of division between Samia Halaby and some of the other members of the 22 Wooster Gallery.

During 18 years of teaching art at American Universities she found one place she loved. It was Hawaii. After her first year she returned as visiting professor to the University of Hawaii twice. After the most recent return in 1986 one could see the profound influence on her paintings of the tropical vegetation and dramatic light of the islands. One of her finest painting, an installation work dating from 1985 was titled To Niihau from Palestine, and was dedicated to the Hawaiians and to the working class in Hawaii. Niihau is one of the Hawaiian islands which is privately owned and where only Hawaiians of 'pure' decent can live; and they live there in a state similar to slavery.

Samia Halaby continues to search for ways to interact with fellow artists in a meaningful way independently of the devastating effects of the art market. In this direction she has tried to host events of poetry reading and showing of paintings. Another is an attempt to publish a Xerox book by artist and poets of international origin in support of the liberation struggles in Palestine and south Africa. Recently she has become active in a group called Arab Women Artists which functions in New York.

In 1989 her paintings were included in the third biennial of Havana in Cuba and in 1994 they were included in the exhibition of Arab women at the National Museum of Women in Washington, DC. Her most recent solo exhibition of electronic art was in 1993 at the 911 Gallery in Indianapolis -- a gallery devoted to electronic art. Her most recent oils and acrylics solo show was at Darat Al-Funun in Amman in 1995. She has participated in a number of national and international conferences on computer art. She presented a paper and showed her work at the Fourth International Symposium on Electronic Art in 1994 and will be doing so in 1996 as well. Both papers are printed in the conference proceedings.

Samia Halaby also has an electronic studio on the World Wide Web which is visited daily by Web Surfers from all over the world. This studio is much like an exhibition and resembles a book format. In it are essays on her paintings both oil and electronic. She has also placed five essays on Palestine dealing with her memories and experiences.

Her professional resume shows a short list of one artist shows and a slightly more substantial list of museums which own her work. this seems to indicate the trouble she has had in making gallery contacts due to chauvinism against women and against Arabs. Yet clearly museum curators have readily recognized the value of her artistic contribution.

Writing is a slow and difficult for her but an endeavor she takes seriously. She has written on recent degenerate art in the New York Galleries, on the being treated as "a minority", on being a Palestinian Arab painter, and an essay comparing the Venice biennial of 1988 to the Havana biennial of 1989. A recent unpublished essay traces the history of twentieth century abstraction. A continuing effort is a small book on the history and theory of pictures in general. She has also written about her own work and is the subject of numerous reviews.

You've finished reading the "Long bBiography." You might want to see "An Aesthetic View" or the "Short Bigoraphy" or peruse "The Resume."

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Copyright, Samia A. Halaby, 1998, All rights reserved.

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