The first and only time I’ve seen one of Samia’s paintings was in Taking Shape, an overview of Modernist abstraction in the Arab world.
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University was set to open the first American retrospective of Samia. The show “Samia Halaby: Centers of Energy” was scheduled to open on February 10th 2024, and run until June 9th 2024. The exhibition had been planned by the museum for more than three years and included a substantial catalog, as well as a sister exhibition at Halaby’s other alma mater, Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, to open in late 2024.
On December 20th 2023, Halaby was informed by the museum’s leadership in a two-sentence letter that the exhibition was canceled out of “safety concerns,” despite no evidence of threats to the artwork or the campus. After privately appealing the decision to IU President Pamela Whitten and receiving no response, the artist and her supporters have gone public to ask for support to reinstate the exhibition.
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