art review/Childhood reflections

Amel Wallach

Transcribed from the clipping

“For all their apparent differences, Todd Piker, who is a country potter, and Samia Halaby, an abstract painter with a highly intellectual approach to her work, have far more in common than the fact that both are currently showing their art in SoHo galleries. Piker grew up, gently and with privilege, in an upper-middle-class Port Washington neighborhood. Halaby was born in 1936 in Jerusalem, which, as a Palestinian, she and her family soon had to leave. What they share in common is the indelible marks their childhoods made upon them… Piker is relaxed and ambitious and was willing to take the enormous risk of opening his own pottery eight years ago at the age of 21; Halaby is angry and vigilant, but her work probes for ideas that will make sense of her world… She is becoming more reckless and determined in her own life, too. A year ago last May she received notice her contract would not be renewed as adjunct professor after nine years at the Yale School of Art. And she is fighting it. ‘I never was an activist in the Palestinian cause,’ she said. ‘But there is a connection between my experience of having to leave my home and my dolls in Jerusalem in 1948 and my sensitivity to discrimination. At Yale I was a woman and a Palestinian and I spoke up.’”

Context added by this archive

The Yale non-renewal documented as it happened, inside an art review. The byline is printed “Amel Wallach”; the critic is Amei Wallach. The review pairs a Palestinian painter’s dispossession with a Connecticut potter’s comfortable childhood as two kinds of formative memory, and gives them equal billing. Photo credit: Newsday / Naomi Lasdon.

Cite this item

"art review/Childhood reflections," Newsday, 12 March 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-026. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-026

Elsewhere in the archive

Arab women in the Jabalia refugee camp get their UN-supplied foodNewsday · 27 May 1973 · the same newspaper
Jordan Refugees Put at 200,000Newsday · 17 June 1967 · the same newspaper
Israeli army: ‘High’ chance soldier killed reporterNewsday · 6 September 2022 · the same newspaper
Even Israelis protest West Bank university shutdownThe Evening Sun · 11 January 1982 · the same year
Jews Against GenocideThe Post-Standard · 29 June 1982 · the same year
Jordan no Palestine state, Hussein saysThe Plain Dealer · 3 August 1982 · the same year

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1982-026.

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