Rania Matar ​is available to attend the openings, give artist talks, and engage in conversations.
Number of Photographs: 51

Organized by The Museum Box and The Huntsville Museum of Art.
Please contact Rania Matar if interested.


SHE Installation Photos

The Huntsville Museum of Art

SHE


Photographs by Rania Matar

The traveling exhibition, SHE is a monographic exhibition by Lebanese-born American photographer Rania Matar. Rania has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Focusing on young women in the US and the Middle East who are leaving the cocoon of home and entering adulthood, SHE highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines.

As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Matar’s cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood. In this exhibition, each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects—their age, individuality, physicality and mystery—and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful and alive.

Rania Matar ​is available to attend the openings, give artist talks, and engage in conversations.
Number of Photographs: 27

Please contact Rania Matar or Gisela Carbonell at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum if interested.


On Either Side of the Window at Cornell Fine Arts Museum

InstallationVirtual TourCatalogPress

On Either Side of the Window


Portraits During COVID-19

The traveling exhibition, organized by the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and curated by Gisela Carbonell includes 27 large scale photographs. On view at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum from Jan 15 – May 9, 2021.

From the museum’s website:
“In the spring of 2020, our lives were drastically changed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of this public health crisis were rapidly felt on all levels of society—the economy, education, travel, work. Routines changed as entire cities implemented stay at home orders. The experience of indoor and outdoor space quickly changed for people around the world. This exhibition presents new works by Lebanese American photographer Rania Matar (b. 1964) whose practice investigates personal and collective identity. These images capture the nuances of specific individuals while at home in quarantine. The series, which began with Matar reaching out to friends to take their portraits while at home, has become a community project. Responding to her need to connect with others, Matar captured more than one hundred people who agreed to pose for her. Matar established a connection with her subjects photographing them through a door or window.

These works encourage the viewer to reflect on how we relate to each other. As Matar explains, “It feels as if the news is always dividing us as “them v/s us”, and now here we are a “we”: all in this together, in the same boat, with life at a standstill and reduced to the confinement of home. This virus is such an equalizer, making us all re-evaluate our shared humanity, our fragility, and our priorities.”

Evocative and insightful, the photographs capture a moment of “connecting across barriers,” that emphasizes the collaboration between photographer and sitter: “As the weeks went by and the “new normal” settled in, the portraits started transforming with the window almost acting like a stage and people on the inside becoming active participants in the photo session, bringing their ideas and their performances to the interaction we were creating.” This exhibition is organized by the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in collaboration with the artist.”

Rania Matar ​is available to attend the openings, give artist talks, and engage in conversations.
Number of Photographs: 50

This exhibition is also available as an Art2Art circulating exhibition. Please contact the artist or Art2Art if interested.


In Her Image Installation Photos

Amon Carter Museum of ArtCleveland Museum of Art

In Her Image


Photographs by Rania Matar

In Her Image brings together four bodies of work made between 2009 and 2016, by Lebanese-American photographer Rania Matar, which trace the development of female identity through portraiture. The exhibition was originally organized by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, curated by Joy Jeehye Kim. It was also exhibited at the Cleveland Museum of Art, facilitated by curator Barbara Tannenbaum.

“​Depicting transitional moments of life, from young girlhood to middle age, Matar’s works address personal and collective identity through photographs mining female adolescence and womanhood. Photographing girls and women in both the United States and the Middle East, the artist shows how the forces that shape female identity transcend cultural and geographic boundaries.”
​- Joy Jeehye Kim, Assistant Curator, Amon Carter Museum of American Art

This traveling exhibition surveys four series by the artist

L’Enfant-Femme explores how girls on the cusp of puberty often adopt stereotypical personas derived from mass media when posing for the camera. Matar re-photographed some of those girls three years later to create Becoming: pairs of images chronicling the transition to womanhood. A Girl and Her Room portrays teens in their bedrooms – the personal spaces that best reflect their inner selves. The final series, Unspoken Conversations, juxtaposes adolescent daughters and their middle-aged mothers to convey the complexity and universality of the mother-daughter relationship.

“Matar is a masterful portraitist who, by focusing on the individual, reveals truths about the universal experience of what it means to be female. She establishes a strong and intimate bond with her sitters as she explores the transitions from girlhood through puberty to womanhood and middle age.”
– Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography, Cleveland Museum of Art