Samia Halaby (b. 1936) is a pioneer in twentieth-century abstraction and computer-generated art. Born in Jerusalem, Halaby trained as a painter, earning an MFA at Indiana University, where she joined the faculty before becoming the first woman associate professor at the Yale School of Art, a position she held for a decade. Halaby was also an early practitioner of digital art, generating "kinetic paintings" of colorful shapes, sounds, and textures on a late 1980s Amiga computer. Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy is her first American survey, featuring more than forty paintings, prints, drawings, and computer-generated works of art from across six decades. The exhibition presents a chronological development of her artistic approach to abstraction, examining formal and thematic relationships across bodies of work. Halaby’s recent explorations in large-scale painting will be exhibited alongside her early forays into abstraction, with examples of her drawing and printing practice incorporated throughout. Significantly, her kinetic painting will be reanimated with a new artwork in the museum’s Time-based Media gallery. The exhibition is supported in part by the Jane Fortune Endowment for Women Artists, David Phillips, and the IU Bloomington Public Arts and Humanities Project Grant.

Samia Halaby: Eye Witness follows Samia Halaby’s (b. Jerusalem, 1936) creative journey to experiment with the ways painting conveys her experiences and reflects how she sees the world around her. Halaby’s paintings, which range from miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D, and monochrome to multicolor, are notably shaped by her experiences, and shift accordingly throughout her itinerant career across the Midwest, the East coast, and the Arab world. As a self-described painter of her time, Halaby also explores how technology can enhance and transform painting. Her experimentations thus render new approaches to capturing ephemeral moments. Halaby’s paintings reflect a life of witness, one we are invited to take part in by looking slowly and closely at the artist’s work.