Samia Halaby

Examines formal and thematic relationships across bodies of work by artist Samia Halaby. Samia Halaby is widely recognized as a pioneer in twentieth-century abstraction and computer-generated art and as a leading scholar of Palestinian art. In the last twenty years, Halaby has expanded her practice to larger, more ambitious paintings and canvas-based assemblages. As an early practitioner of digital art, she taught herself programming languages and generated "kinetic paintings" of colorful shapes, sounds, and textures on a late 1980s Amiga computer. Throughout the 1990s, she developed a custom PC program that can generate moving shapes with live keyboard commands. These kinetic paintings and performances, which Halaby has archived as digital video files, have been little studied and not yet exhibited. Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy will bring together approximately thirty-five of Halaby's paintings, prints, and drawings in the first-ever American survey of her work, and features Halaby's writing about her artistic practice.