Samia Halaby: Six decades of art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art

Throughout 2024, beginning on 10 February, the MSU Broad Art Museum and the Eskenazi Museum of Art present a series of exhibitions dedicated to the artist Samia Halaby.

Source: MSU Broad Art Museum · Image: 1 Samia Halaby, Six Golden Heroes, 2022. Collection of the artist, New York. 2 Samia Halaby, The City (Al Quds), 1959. Private collection, North Carolina. Both images © Samia Halaby

Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy opens at the Eskenazi Museum of Art on February 10, 2024. The first American survey of Halaby’s work, the exhibition will examine formal and thematic relationships across bodies of her work, considering simultaneously the influence of Halaby’s time spent in the Midwest, her years of teaching, and her analytic approach to generating forms, both on canvas and in computer code. Halaby’s current explorations in large-scale painting will be exhibited alongside her earliest forays into abstraction. Significantly, her kinetic paintings will be reanimated in real time to demonstrate the development of abstract forms into moving compositions of color and texture.

“Bringing the long arc of Samia Halaby’s remarkable career home to where she earned her MFA and taught painting is an extraordinary tribute to one of the greatest living artists. I am honored to work with Halaby to realize this ambitious contribution to art history,” said Elliot Josephine Leila Reichert, Curator of Contemporary Art at the IU Eskenazi Museum of Art.

“Samia Halaby’s dynamic and innovative approach to artmaking will offer IU students new ways of seeing and thinking about contemporary art. This partnership with the MSU Broad Art Museum presents a unique opportunity for student engagement across two Midwest campuses at institutions that value artistic experimentation,” said David A. Brenneman, Wilma E. Kelley Director, IU Eskenazi Museum of Art.