“Samia Halaby’s Abstract Art Explores Themes of Displacement and Home”
# The Legacy of Samia Halaby: A Trailblazer in Abstract and Digital Art
### Introduction
At the intersection of abstract painting, digital art, and social consciousness resides the compelling work of Samia Halaby. Revered as a trailblazer in both contemporary abstraction and computer-generated art, Halaby’s expansive career spans over six decades. Her first major U.S. retrospective, *Samia Halaby: Eye Witness*, currently on display at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, not only celebrates her role as a pioneer in art but also amplifies her narrative as a multifaceted human being — artist, innovator, educator, and advocate.
### A Grand Homecoming
*Eye Witness* represents an almost poetic homecoming for Halaby, now 88. She attended Michigan State University in the late 1950s, earning her MA in painting while simultaneously laying the foundation for her lifelong journey into abstraction. The exhibition breathes vibrancy into MSU’s Broad Art Museum, a space designed by the late Zaha Hadid. Its angular, avant-garde architecture seems tailor-made to showcase Halaby’s bold, energetic works steeped in color, movement, and introspection.
The retrospective includes a wide array of Halaby’s signature styles. Her pieces range from the serene and meditative, such as *Lilac Bushes* (1960), to dynamic compositions that buzz with urban energy like *Mother of Pearl II* (2013). These canvases speak not only to the artist’s mastery of brushwork but also to a life steeped in transitions and transformations — metaphorical and literal.
### From Canvas to Code: Pioneer of Digital Art
One of the most striking elements of Halaby’s artistic legacy is her early adoption of technology as a creative medium. In 1986, Halaby acquired an Amiga personal computer and taught herself how to code, ushering her into the world of digital art. At a time when the computer was largely dismissed as a tool for artistic production, Halaby’s kinetic paintings, such as *Bird Dog* (1987–88) and *Land* (1988), demonstrated how coding and algorithms could merge with traditional artistry. Her digital art doesn’t just push the boundaries of visual expression; it challenges the notion of what constitutes fine art in the modern age.
Televisions strategically placed within the exhibition project her kinetic paintings, their hypnotic rhythms serving as digital counterpoints to her gestural canvases. Through these works, Halaby blurs the lines between analog and digital, tradition and innovation — a fitting metaphor for her artistic journey.
### The Weight of Diaspora
While vibrant and dynamic, Halaby’s art is underpinned by a deeply personal and often tumultuous geographic migration. Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby and her family fled to Lebanon during the Nakba in 1948, eventually resettling in the United States in 1951. This displacement informed her artistic approach, infusing her abstract works with visceral emotions tied to homeland, belonging, and displacement.
Through a lens of migration, many of her abstract compositions gain deeper resonance. A painting like *I Found Myself Growing in an Old Olive Tree* (2005) captures her connection to Palestine, both as a physical space and as a symbol of resilience and cultural memory. Her career, one that straddles continents and ideologies, is as much about personal storytelling as it is about innovation.
### Navigating a Complicated Art World
Despite her contributions to art and technology, Halaby’s work has been glaringly underrepresented in the mainstream American art world. As a Palestinian artist and advocate for Arab and Palestinian perspectives, she has consistently faced political pushback. This became glaringly evident earlier this year when a retrospective slated to open at Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art was canceled — a decision widely interpreted as silencing a Palestinian voice.
The inclusion of *Samia Halaby: Eye Witness* at MSU Broad Art Museum, then, feels all the more significant. Michigan is home to the largest Arab and Arab-American population in the United States, but exhibitions featuring Arab and Muslim artists, particularly women, remain woefully rare. That Halaby’s trailblazing legacy is finally receiving institutional recognition is an essential step that has the potential to inspire a larger shift in the art world — one that celebrates diversity of experience and identity.
### Artistic Evolution: From Figuration to Kineticism
One highlight of *Eye Witness* is its ability to trace the evolution of Halaby’s practice over time. While she has always been deeply invested in the principles of form and abstraction, the exhibition showcases key transitions in her career. From her early experiments with figuration and optical illusion in the 1960s to her departure into freeform kinetic abstraction, each phase is reflected in sketches, watercolors, and even a hanging papier-mâché sculpture