This article appeared in Being Samia Halaby Issue #68 dedicated to spotlighting the journey of Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American artist whose resilience shines through despite challenges like the cancellation of a significant exhibition at Indiana University. Halaby’s remarkable year, marked by global exhibitions and well-deserved acclaim, underscores her ability to transcend borders with art that prompts reflection on themes of identity, belonging, and social justice, serving as a bridge across cultural divides.
The University of Cincinnati, college of applied art, 1954-1959, Bachelor of Science in Design.
Life with my fellow students at the University of Cincinnati was pleasant and friendly. My immigrant status was recognised by some in friendly ways whence a nickname was given me by one friend, of Salmon Halibut. But the time was not completely free of unpleasant events revealing ignorant attitudes towards Palestinians. I was baffled that telling my still very fresh memories of experiencing exile elicited vacant stares or hostile reactions. As I adjusted to college life in the Midwest of America, the best social activities with fellow students were our interest in both the Ohio river front and the Art Museum in Mt Adams, where we often visited and chatted in envy of those who studied art there. We were aware and regretted the absence of any galleries in our city whose advocates boasted that ‘Greater Cincinnati’ had one million residents.
My education in the Midwest was excellent by no one’s intention or design. The different Universities I attended and the changing professorial staff somehow all converged on my own life’s timeline to create what in hindsight I consider to be an excellent art education – given that it was a Western art education and not one that took the rest of the world into cognisance. My professors at the University of Cincinnati were very interesting individuals and the fare was unexpectedly admixed. There were those who admired the Bauhaus movement and wanted to impress upon us principles they implied had originated there, such as that materials should be appropriate to intended use and that form should follow function. There were those who sought to be very scientific and their attitude manifested in our education regarding colour. Colour was presented in two different ways. One art teacher taught us some principles of colour matching but did us the more important service of giving us an understanding of the Munsell colour system. The other part was sending us to the physics department to study the physics of light and the physiology of the eye. I was impressed by our physics professor and thought of him as a great performer of magical demonstrations of the principles he taught. And although our textbook was supplemental, I read it several times over during that year and several times again after I graduated — “An Introduction to Colour” by Ralph M. Evans.
24 x 35 ¾ in (61 x 91 cm).
Yet another current of thought among the young professors at the University of Cincinnati was social resistance, injected into us by admirers of the social realists and political justice painters such as Ben Shahn, Phillip Evergood, Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and other resistance artists of the Industrial Union movement. And finally, in my favourite class, drawing and painting, there was an old professor who had studied in Parisian academies and insisted on teaching us, one precise step at a time, the principles of chiaroscuro and perspective, and the proportions of the human figure. We spent a full year making crosshatch drawings of plaster casts. Then came the flesh and blood model to be drawn in charcoal only, no colour, and finally in our final year we were ready and permitted to touch brush and watercolour to paper using colour, of course. And since my major at the time was design, I underwent two rigorous years of drafting and executed perspective drawings with T-square, triangles, compasses, and ink pens. I took a drafting course for two years which taught me completely the details of the perspective theory in detail, including all the fixes it encompassed to correct for the fact that it really is not a comprehensive representation of what our one eye sees (the other eye had to be closed) when stationary.
I was not inclined to object to education, nor in fact were any of my schoolmates. We took it all in like birds in a nest with beaks wide open. It was the mid 1950s and, although a stranger to the land, I could tell that it was the post-depression era so everyone was grateful to have work and was worried they would lose their jobs. The students were generally serious about learning what was so dearly paid for by their parents.
Michigan State University, East Lansing, 1959-1960, Master of Art in Painting
At Michigan State University, I began to meet some of the minor stars of American contemporary art. Jackson Pollock’s brother Charles Pollock, a very gentle being, was teaching there and many visiting artists from New York arrived to give us a taste of a far-away exotic world. There was Boris Margo (1902-1995) whose teaching was vacuous and he passed through my education quietly leaving only the scent of strange ambiances. The work of visiting artists often baffled me for seeming to be more about appearances and stylistic territory than to visual exploration. Now in hindsight, I recognize the carving out of a brand, a look that would identify an artist’s work but in my youth I only saw skeletons and remains. I attributed such painting to the private insanities of the older generation. I did not then know of the demands of ‘success’ and the commercial galleries, nor of the inordinate negative influence they could exert. What led me to make art was foreign to the success-oriented commercial gallery world that I eventually had to confront.
It was ‘macho’ time in the art world that year I spent at Michigan State University in East Lansing and male supremacy in the arts began to replace the more egalitarian student fellowship that I experienced in Cincinnati. Hypnotism with psycho analysis derived from the Surrealism movement of the 1930’s combined with the macho attitude, what might be thought of as the ‘truck-driver become artist’ syndrome, created art criticism focused on phallic symbols. A young art student could be totally demolished and embarrassed when some professor or fellow student suddenly pointed to some vague convergence of shapes and called out ‘aha, a phallic symbol.’ Educators began to posture and the attitude of serious learning at the University of Cincinnati was slowly replaced by teaching via proclamations.
But there were also memorable professors at Michigan State University who had no professional reputation but were good teachers who paid attention to us individually. One such was a professor whose family name was Hendricks, and I think that I never knew his first name. I remember him coming to class after-hours and finding me freely exploring curved lines, and him telling me how important they were. In later years I would remember the significance of what I was doing back then.
Special among the lesser-known teachers at Michigan State University was a truly old professor by the name of John D. Martelli (1903-1979) who taught stone lithography. To persuade us of how fine and detailed stone lithography could be. He showed us decorative lacy frames used in advertising that he made to earn money. He enjoyed telling us how once he planned how to catch red-handed someone who stole his designs. He had laid a trap so that when the unsuspecting thief was accused and claimed innocence, he, de Martelli, would pull out an enlarging glass and insist the client take a careful look. At that point it would be revealed that the entire delicate lacework was executed using his signature so small that it was invisible to the naked eye, with John D. Martelli, repeated over and over. He enjoyed telling the story laughing profusely to my enduring admiration.
Indiana University, Bloomington, 1961-1963, Master of Fine Art
After a year of working as a hack designer in Cincinnati, I did two years of study at Indiana University in order to earn a degree that would allow me to teach at the University level. At Indiana University, the painting star then was James McGarrell whose work embodied the self-portraiture of affluent middle class-ness and homes full of material objects. I had embraced an idea that I wanted to be an abstract painter and no way was I inclined to imitate my teachers of the time. But still, I did hear them all out and learnt. James McGarrell used to tell me that New York rejected him and so he jumped over it to get to the European market. That impressed me and as I think about it now in my ninth decade of life, I see that I too had to jump over New York, not to the European market but to the Arab market, and then a small step into the world.
What was special about Indiana University was the presence and friendly fellowship of both practising artists and art historians in the same department and the magnificent interaction that took place from sharing hallways and neighbouring offices and studios. I was spellbound by art history and I was fortunate in attending classes by two very responsible and exciting lecturers. I would think to myself what a luxury it was to sit in a classroom and hear their narratives. I would quickly make a sketch in my notebook of the slides they showed, write the names, dates, and some of their ideas. Albert Elsen and Jack Wasserman were their names and they were outstanding lecturers. I heard every word and noted every time Elsen postured in the light of the slide projector. I felt myself fortunate to be served up such lectures and that it was a rare and fleeting luxury. I felt truly grateful that I had the time and opportunity on a regular weekly schedule to sit in relative comfort listening to well organised lectures. They each had a reserved-shelf for their classes in the library and I can safely say that I looked at each picture and considered the ideas of the lectures and my own thoughts of aesthetic development, geography, and form; but I mostly found the reading unattractive.
Artistic Thought
As I try to push back into memory, it seems that I yearned to be an abstract painter from the very beginning. But what beginning is there? I am a part of the continuum of the cultural growth of mankind. I enter a river flowing at unpredictable and changing speed even reversing at times. I remember daring to do a small abstract painting in colours on cardboard sometime during my undergraduate education. In delicious isolation in the basement of our new house on Teakwood Ave in Cincinnati and still a teenager who grew up in Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Beirut, I dared myself to do so and broke the surface tension of belief. There it is, I thought, a small abstract painting, and then I forgot it as I returned to the demands of my education. It was in that same basement earlier, sometime in my teenage years, that I had requested and got permission to use a small room in the basement for my studio. What would have been a small up high window typical of Midwestern homes was not glazed and allowed no light. I noted that it looked more like a shoot that could become open. I concluded that this little studio, my very first, had once been a coal room in an old brick home. But I filled it with my tables and treasures and did some artwork there.
While still in high school, perhaps a year after arriving in the US, feeling very bored and not knowing what to do, my mother reminded me that I loved painting and suggested that I do some. I took up watercolours and available paper, set up a basket of fruit and spent the afternoon quietly absorbed. It was my first painting done after emerging from childhood and conscious of it being under my own responsibility without direction or advice. The abstraction done some few years later was the first abstraction that I did for myself. These two innocent, unremarkable paintings were the speed at which I veered into the fast moving river of the culture of picture making. It was the sixth decade of the twentieth century and only fifty years after the Soviet revolution and the birth of abstraction, that in later years I came to envy so much. That short span of time was several times the number of my teenage years. Now, a bit over a century after the Soviet revolution, I have carefully studied that history and have come to envy those forward-looking artists who lived at the time of the revolution and experienced the huge power of its inspirations.
During my graduate education my aesthetic thoughts began to flow, a kind of secret life of visual ideas. At first, I did paintings, prints, and drawings of simplified, geometricised images aggregated in frontal compositions describing familiar scenes, many of which included a female form seen from the back as though I was looking at myself as a young female who was looking into a world she remembers. Often there was a palm tree and a house. It was the palm tree that I drew endlessly in my childhood. I often drew it on the foggy window of the Rover my father drove us in as we commuted weekly between Yafa and Jerusalem to visit grandparents and cousins. Later during my graduate year at Michigan State University, I began to want to do abstract painting but did not know how to study abstraction or how to think about it. At that time, I loved Paul Klee and that helped a little. But his paintings were too similar in spirit to my first innocent attempts and that is probably why I liked him and thus they did not help me develop the next steps. Eventually, I managed to transform some of those initial geometricised ideas that I began with into a kind of textural impressionism and a few of them formed my graduation show at Michigan State University in 1960. Their subjects were shadowy figures and landscapes.
During my first year as graduate student at Indiana University, in trying to be abstract, I made paintings of my environment and tried to camouflage the parts into abstract imagery. As I look back, it interests me that in many of them the subject was scenes in the kitchen and if figures were present, Often one of them would be me. It seems that again, as in my first works, I had substantial focus on asserting that I existed; and since family life took place around the table at mealtime, the kitchen was often the background theatre. In due time my love of art history began to guide me and encourage me to consciously adopt influences from the abstract and revolutionary art of the 20th century. By my last year at Indiana University as a graduate student I experienced a breakthrough. I remember it as one of many which happened to me subsequently many times. Suddenly my hands and my intuitions knew what to paint in ways that converted conscious rumination into quiet, unquestioning certainty.
The result of my breakthrough was flat colour paintings and I did many of them. I began to see that they were abstractions based on visual experiences of surfaces in our surroundings. In them shape, size, space, and colour were all relative. They were the paintings of my MFA exhibition at the Indiana University Gallery in 1963. Thus, my graduate student paintings, over a period of four years, all put together in chronological order, seemed to first say that I exist in the world and therefore I will paint my understanding of it. The paintings poured out profusely once I started painting my understanding of something in the world outside of my life. The aimlessness of confusion that pushes artists into mysticism evaporated in the bright light of reality.
I took my MFA graduation show perhaps more seriously than the school expected me to. I was given an appointment to meet my examiners, the painting and printmaking faculty, who would decide if I were to fail or not. It was generally understood to be the final formality to earning a degree. I took my savings and went downtown to an upscale department store and bought a suit for the occasion, one which I wore on the long plane ride to Honolulu to start my first teaching position in 1964 at the University of Hawaii Manoa, on the Island of Oahu.