MSU Broad Art Museum presents “Samia Halaby: Eye Witness”

From June 28 to December 15, 2024, the MSU Broad Art Museum presents the exhibition “Samia Halaby: Eye Witness”

Source: MSU Broad Art Museum · Image: Left: Samia Halaby, “Six Golden Heroes”, 2022. Collection of the artist, New York. Courtesy the artist. Right: Samia Halaby, “The City (Al Quds)”, 1959. Private collection, North Carolina. Courtesy the artist.

The exhibition is Halaby’s first return to MSU since her graduation over sixty years ago. “Eye Witness” follows Halaby’s creative journey to invent an abstract visual language that conveys her experiences and reflects how she sees the world around her. From 1959 to 1960, Halaby attended MSU and earned her MA. It was at MSU that she began painting in earnest. Halaby’s paintings, which range from miniature to monumental, 2D to 3D, and monochrome to multicolor, were notably shaped by the experiences she had in each place, and shift throughout her itinerant career across the Midwest, the East coast, and the Arab world. Eye Witness brings some of the paintings Halaby made during her time at MSU back to Michigan for the first time, returning the work of one of the most important and prolific painters of a generation, and an esteemed MSU alumna, to the institution where her artistic career began.

“This exhibition is a joyful homecoming for the inimitable Samia Halaby, one which is long overdue,” commented Rachel Winter, Assistant Curator at the MSU Broad Art Museum. “It is an honor to bring the artist and her work back to the place where her painterly journey began: MSU. I hope people will celebrate Halaby and this special moment with us, but also cherish what a unique and rare opportunity it is to see her work.”

“These landmark exhibitions will not only bring back into the spotlight the significant Midwestern roots of the esteemed, internationally regarded artist, Samia Halaby—it is also an important opportunity for the two museums to work together in partnership,” noted Interim Director Steven L. Bridges of the MSU Broad Art Museum. “These retrospectives intersect to share each institution’s unique relationship to this artist and point to the ways university art museums continue to lead the field as sites of critical engagement.”

The accompanying catalogue, Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy, co-published by Hirmer Verlag, spans the works included in the companion exhibitions and Halaby’s creative periods in the Midwest.