Samia Halaby, Red Trees

Palestinian-American artist, scholar, and activist Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem and moved to the United States in 1951 following the Arab-Israeli War. As a woman and an immigrant, Halaby faced the daunting task of navigating a primarily white, male-dominated art world of the 1960s. “The ambient propaganda places us in categories labeled ‘minorities.’ The implication is that we are lesser,” she has said of her experience. “Our work is seen as different from and less significant than the art of the mainstream…I was completely rejected for being an Arab, a Palestinian, an immigrant, a female, for being political, and for speaking with an accent.” 

Despite the hardships she encountered, she went on to break gender barriers as the first full-time female faculty member in the Yale School of Art. Her distinguished career in academia began in Honolulu, when shortly after completing graduate school in 1963 she landed her first job as an instructor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She returned to Hawaiʻi several times, including to teach in the summer of 1966 and in 1985–86 as a visiting artist. Her art and scholarship are guided by issues such as the rights of Palestinians and other displaced peoples, colonialism, war, and racism. Her artist’s book and mural created in Honolulu in 1985, For Niʻihau from Palestine, connects Hawaiʻi with the Middle East through the politics of self-determination and land rights. As someone who knows “the pain applied to oppressed nationalities,” she wrote, she dedicated the project to Native Hawaiians and “the working-class in Hawai‘i.” 

In the 1970s, a growing interest in the physical properties of materials. In HoMA’s painting Red Trees narrow striations of black, blue, red, and silver, join to form shapes that appear to twist and curve in multiple directions. The title suggests leaves that turn color in autumn, then fall to the ground, while the metallic sheen alludes to steel or reflective surfaces found in the built environment.

— Katherine Love, Assistant Curator Contemporary Art 

 
Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem. Lives and works in New York.) 
Red Trees, 1974 
Oil on canvas 
Gift of Joseph Cantor Foundation, 1986 (5453.1)