Artist talk with Rania Matar
From Personal to Universal
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
6:00 - 7:30 PM PST
On Wednesday, January 13, we heard from Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar. Rania has dedicated her artistic practice to exploring both sides of her cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative, in addressing issues of personal and collective identity, through photographing girls and women both in the United States where she lives and in the Middle East where she is from. Focusing on both cultures is especially important to her in the current political climate we live in, where the ‘them vs. us’ rhetoric is so prevalent.
Through her work, and by making intimate portraits of girls and women, she seeks to focus on our essence, our physicality and on the commonalities that make us human, to emphasize underlying similarities rather than apparent differences. Her photographs reveal the beauty in our shared humanity – in the universal as well as personal experience of women encountering the challenges of growing up regardless of background, culture and religion.
ABOUT RANIA MATAR
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums, institutions, and private collections worldwide. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the American University of Beirut Museum.
Matar received a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in- residency grant, 2011 Legacy Award at the Griffin Museum of Photography, 2011 and 2007 Massachusetts Cultural Council artist fellowships. In 2008 she was a finalist for the Foster Award at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, with an accompanying solo exhibition.
She has published three books: L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009. She is currently working on her fourth book SHE (2021) with Radius Books.
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