EAST LANSING, Mich. — The road from Detroit to Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum is bleak in winter. Gray permeates everything: the sky, the barren trees, the sidewalks. It was almost a sensory shock to enter Samia Halaby: eyewitness. The 88-year-old occupies the entire second floor of the spacious Zaha Hadid-designed museum artist abstract paintings are luxurious fields of color and form. Each pulsates with its own energy. Some, like ‘Sun’ (2015), are pure vibrations; others, like “Lilac Bushes” (1960), are calm and heavy with paint; others still have the hustle and bustle of a morning run (“Mother of Pearl II,” 2013) or the grace of a ballet (“For Jean Gordon,” 1990). The angular shards of “Angels and Butterflies” (2010), dominated by blue and purple, evoke a Blue Rider-esque mountain range, while the sleek “Aluminum Steel” (1971) reflects the nearby auto industry; it was reminiscent of the Ford River Rouge plant south of Detroit, which lights up like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at night.
The visual dynamism of Halaby’s paintings is appropriate: the artist is a pioneer in the field of computer art. In 1986 she got an Amiga PC and learned to code; from there she transformed her works on canvas and paper into digital images, or kinetic paintings. Although the exhibition focuses largely on her hand-painted works, the largest of which feel almost like virtual worlds unto themselves, televisions in the galleries display her digital creations, including the hypnotic kinetic paintings “Bird Dog” (1987–88) and “Grond” ( 1988).
It’s easy to get lost in the visual stimuli and in Halaby’s artistic journey, from a greater focus on form and optical illusion in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a few examples of figuration, to nervous works that echo her kinetic paintings. Striking small watercolors and preparatory sketches in vitrines, as well as works on irregular canvases and a multicolored biomorphic papier-mâché sculpture hanging in one gallery, allow visitors to wander through her creative processes and trajectories. But an equally important journey was her personal journey. The MSU Broad may seem off the beaten path for an artist who has lived and worked in New York since 1976, but Eyewitness is a homecoming of sorts: Halaby received her MA from Michigan State in 1960, where she began to think seriously about painting, and taught at the University of Michigan from 1967 to ’69. Her artistic journey also charts a life: Born in Palestine in 1936, Halaby was displaced with her family to Lebanon in 1948 and moved to the United States three years later. Through this lens, the constant activity in her abstractions begins to suggest geographic migration, voluntary or otherwise.
Michigan has the largest Arab and Arab-American population in the US, but art exhibitions by Arab and Muslim artists, especially women, are still not as frequent as they should be, and they are not more common in the rest of the country. . A retrospective exhibition of Halaby’s works was even scheduled to open in February at the Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University (where she received her MFA), but was abruptly canceled in what many, including the artist himself, saw as an act . of suppression of Palestinian voices.
It is astonishing that this is Halaby’s first retrospective of American museums in a career that has spanned more than half a century. She is a pioneer on multiple levels; it’s time for her recognition to start a trend.
Samia Halaby: eyewitness runs through December 15 at the MSU Broad Art Museum (547 East Circle Drive, East Lansing, Michigan). The exhibition was curated by Rachel Winter, with support from Thaís Wenstrom and Laine Lord.
