Performing Abstraction: Samia Halaby with Members of the Kronos Quartet

Join us for an extraordinary afternoon of live art and music with digital art pioneer Samia Halaby and members of the internationally acclaimed Kronos Quartet. This special collaboration brings together Halaby’s digital abstractions and the quartet’s original music to create live compositions.

Halaby coded her “Kinetic Painting Program” in the early 1990s in the computing language C, turning her keyboard into a live painting instrument through which she can manipulate colors and movement as vibrant abstractions that shift, collide, and dissolve across the digital projection. Responding to Halaby’s ever-evolving visuals, three members of Kronos Quartet — David Harrington (violin), Gabriela Díaz (violin), and Paul Wiancko (cello) — will respond sonically, improvising to the rhythm, velocity, and textures of Halaby’s kinetic paintings. At times meditative and dynamic, audiences will be immersed in a performance where light, motion, and melody unfold together in moments of unique artistic dialogue.

An artist talk with Samia Halaby will take place at SFMOMA on Thursday, April 2, 2026.

About the Performers

Samia Halaby (b. 1936, Jerusalem) is a Palestinian American artist and scholar living and working in New York. Her most recent exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial, New York (2026), the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Riyadh (2026), and the Hyundai Card First Look: Samia Halaby, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2025). Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Guggenheim, New York and Abu Dhabi; Lenbachhaus, Munich; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and many other public and private collections. In 2025, Halaby was honored with the MUNCH Award for artistic freedom. In 2024, the jury of the Biennale Arte in Venice awarded her a Special Mention in recognition of her longstanding work.

For over fifty years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet (David Harrington, violin; Gabriela Díaz, violin; Ayane Kozasa, viola; Paul Wiancko, cello) has reimagined what the string quartet experience can be. One of the most celebrated and influential groups of our era, Kronos has given thousands of concerts worldwide, released more than seventy recordings, and collaborated with many of the world’s most accomplished composers and performers across many genres. Kronos has received more than forty awards, including three Grammys and the Polar Music, Avery Fisher, and Edison Klassiek Oeuvre Prizes. In 2024, Kronos’s Pieces of Africa album was inducted into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. Most recently, Kronos Quartet has been selected as the Doomsday Clock Artists in Residence for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Through its nonprofit organization, Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA), Kronos has commissioned more than 1,100 works and arrangements for quartet. KPAA also manages Kronos’s concert tours, local performances, recordings, and education programs. In its most ambitious commissioning effort to date, KPAA has recently completed Kronos Fifty for the Future. Through this initiative, Kronos has commissioned — and distributed online for free — fifty new works for string quartet designed for students and emerging professionals, written by composers from around the world.
 

Performing Abstraction: Samia Halaby with Members of the Kronos Quartet is part of Electric Movements, a performance series curated by Karen Cheung, interim assistant curator, media, technology, and culture. Performances are produced by Chloe Kwiatkowski, senior program specialist, public engagement; with Bella Mello, manager, public engagement.