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Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Halaby is one of the most important painters of her generation. Halaby moved to the US from Lebanon in 1954 following her family’s 1948 flight from Palestine. Her education was significantly shaped by American Midwest institutions. An influential university educator, she taught throughout the Midwest before becoming the first woman to be full-time faculty at Yale. Halaby settled in New York in the 1970s where she actively creates colorful, energetic, and innovative large-scale, abstract paintings. She is also a pioneer of digital art, utilizing computer coding to generate kinetic paintings.

Building on these themes, we invite presentations that consider the work of Palestinian artists in diaspora throughout the 20th and 21st centuries in any medium. We are particularly interested in questions that attend to the impact of artistic peripheries, such as but not limited to the American Midwest, and the role of diaspora or exile in shaping one's artistic practice. The result is a reconsideration of the ways Palestinian artists, who are often overlooked, innovate their own visual languages while engaging in a dialogue with different art histories.