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.
