Beer With a Painter: Samia Halaby
At her longtime studio in Tribeca, the Palestinian-American painter discussed her experimentation with color and how she “accidentally stepped into abstraction.”
Over the past 70 years, pioneering abstract painter Samia Halaby has dedicated herself to examining how we see, how plants grow, how towns are organized, and how abstraction has developed across cultures. The Palestinian-American artist works, as she says, with “both eyes open, to glean principles from nature.” Her paintings are a reflection of this relentless investigation.
Halaby was born in Jerusalem in 1936 and lived as a child in Jaffa. During the Nakba of 1948, her family was among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced when the state of Israel was established. They lived in Beirut, Lebanon, for three years before moving to the United States in 1951. Halaby identifies with Marxist philosophy and reads art history through this lens; she has been organizing for causes concerning Palestinian rights, class, and race since the 1970s.
Her abstract paintings, which often reference medieval Arabic art and Palestinian culture, are characterized by their energy, movement, and optimism. Halaby expresses a vision of infinite space and growth, without barriers or boundaries. Vivid and intensely colored geometries overlap, and multiple textures collide. Over her decades-long career, Halaby’s paintings have evolved from constructed geometric still lifes to plotted helical forms with illusionistic metallic highlights to diagonal fields of color to kinetic, digital paintings, and back to pigment on canvas.
In 2024, her first museum survey exhibition was held at the Broad Art Museum of Michigan State University, East Lansing, and co-organized by the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington (where Halaby received her MA and MFA, respectively). However, Indiana University abruptly canceled its half of the show in what many consider a suppression of Palestinian voices. “If that were not their intention why not accept my offer to meet with them and clear matters?” Halaby told Hyperallergic at the time. “Why did they not speak up during the three long years of preparation?”
We met in her loft in Tribeca, Manhattan, where she has lived and worked since 1976. Like her paintings, it is a center of energy. Her kitchen backsplash is marked with squares of pure color — the wet paint from her brushes at the end of a work day (“less wasteful,” she tells me); her bedroom converts to an office space; and her studio is filled with new paintings in progress, paper drying racks, and her hanging acrylic-on-paper-maché sculptures. Over sage tea, we spoke about the history of dimensionality in art, abstractionist movements and their ties to social revolutions, and the development of her own work.
Halaby’s digital paintings are currently on view in the 2026 Whitney Biennial and were the subject of a 2026 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1972, Halaby became the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art, where she taught for a decade. She has also published three books: Liberation Art of Palestine (2002), Drawing the Kafr Qasem Massacre (2017), and Growing Shapes: Aesthetic Insights of an Abstract Painter (2017).
