Born Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, 1936; lives in New York, New York
Samia Halaby
Bird Dog, 1987
Kinetic painting programmed on an Amiga computer, sound, 3’40’’
Circles, 1987
Kinetic painting programmed on an Amiga computer, sound, 1’11’’
Flyover Jersey, 1987
Kinetic painting programmed on an Amiga computer, sound, 1’17’’
Samia Halaby was raised in the port city of Jaffa, Mandatory Palestine. In 1948, when she was eleven years old, her family was expelled from their home as the state of Israel was created. For three years, the Halabys resided in Beirut, Lebanon, before immigrating to the United States and landing in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1951. After receiving several degrees, in 1972 Halaby became the first full-time female professor to work at the Yale University School of Art. While Halaby is primarily known as an abstract painter, she is also one of the earliest innovators of digital art. In 1986, Halaby began programming and producing digital art on the Commodore Amiga 1000 computer. She taught herself how to code using the programming languages BASIC and C and called her resultant works “kinetic paintings.” These three early examples typify Halaby’s commitment to abstraction, including to its sociopolitical history and its relevance to the present moment. “The kind of painting that I want to do is painting that reflects our time,” she has said, adding, “which has the newest language, and includes the newest content of our time.”
Mondrian Boogie Woogie, 2016
Acrylic on jute, 69 5/16 x 100 in.
Piet Mondrian is one of the early 20th century painters of abstraction that I admired. I admired his treatise on trees analyzing the basics of the negative positive relationship of branches to the space between. His plus and minus series is based on his studies of both trees and piers -- a significant lesson on how abstraction extracts principles from nature and applies them to the making of abstract pictures. Eventually Mondrian adopted a rigid attitude to the right angle and to primary color. Late in his life New York's active life influenced the creation of the "Broadway Boogie Woogie" series. For me the earlier phases of his work were more attractive, more versatile. My admiration led me to make a painting which I titled Mondrian Boogie Woogie. As I painted, I was talking to him and told him that I would obey his vertical/horizontal, right-angle relationships, but take liberties in organizing the total of the picture in order to make major rectangles in the painting move freely back and forth in relative space. I also told him in my mind that his later paintings were too rigid in color and that I was going to use the relativity of color to aid in the reading of space.
