Young Collectors Auction - exhibit-E

SamiaHALABY1936Lot 038'Position Delay' Signed, Dated58 X 53 cm. Silkscreen (40/75) 1981Estimate (US$ 2,000 - 3,000)Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby is a leading Palestinian painter and scholar. After immigrating tothe US via Lebanon in 1951, she obtained a Bachelor of Science in Design from the University of Cincinnatiin 1959 and a Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University in 1963. Shortly after, she began an extensivecareer of teaching art at universities throughout the US, which culminated in a ten-year position asthe first fulltime female associate professor at the world-renowned Yale School of Art in New Haven,Connecticut. Although based in New York, Halaby has also worked in the Arab world, teaching at suchforemost institutions as Birzeit University in the West Bank and Darat al-Funun in Amman, Jordan.Since 1970, she has held countless solo exhibitions, both in the US and abroad and has been featured in anumber of groundbreaking exhibitions of Arab art, such as “Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World”at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. (1994) and “Made in Palestine” at theStation Museum of Art in Houston, Texas (2003). Her large abstract canvases have had successfulsales at auctions throughout the Middle East.Halaby’s work is housed in several museum collections worldwide, most notably the Jordan NationalGallery of Fine Arts, The British Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, andThe Detroit Institute of Art. As an art historian, she has been instrumental in curating several exhibitionsin the US, while her many years of researching and writing led to the publishing of Liberation Art ofPalestine (2002), one of the few English-language books on contemporary Palestinian art available today.Although her exceptional style of painting has changed dramatically over the years-from large canvasesexploring the color planes of geometric and helix formations to colorist assemblages that speak ofmovement and nature-she has continued to push the boundaries of art for over forty years. As a result,she is recognized as a major contributor to the school of abstraction in Arab art. Halaby’s vivid canvaseshave been praised in a number of leading American publications including The New York Times and Artin America, while her exhibitions in the Arab world have been reviewed by Al Nahar and The Daily Star.In 1983, she created a computer program for kinetic paintings, an aspect of her oeuvre that resulted inseveral audio-visual presentations, including a tour of Syria, Palestine and Jordan and a performanceaccompanied by live musicians at New York’s Lincoln Center (1998).