From Personal to Universal — Photographs by Rania Matar
Wednesday 20 November, 2019 — 7:00-8:30 PM @ Firehouse Center for the Arts
Co-sponsored by Sweethaven Gallery and Firehouse Center for the Arts
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut and at Cornell University, she studied photography at the New England School of Photography and the Maine Photographic Workshops. Matar started teaching photography in 2009 and offered summer photography workshops to teenage girls in Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps with the assistance of non-governmental organizations. She now teaches Personal Documentary Photography, and Portrait and Identity at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and regularly offers talks, class visits and lectures at museums, galleries, schools and colleges in the US and abroad. In the winter/spring of 2017, she was an artist-in-residence at the Gund Gallery at Kenyon College, through a Mellon Foundation Grant and was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
Matar’s work focuses on girls and women. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative informs her photography. She has dedicated her work to exploring both sides of this identity: addressing issues of personal and collective identity, through photographs mining female adolescence and womanhood – both in the United States where she lives and the Middle East where she is from. Her work has won several awards, has been featured in numerous publications, and exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her images are in the permanent collections of several museums worldwide and can be seen at www.raniamatar.com.
Lecture followed by Q&A
Date: Wednesday, 20 November, 2019
Firehouse Center for the Arts, Market Square, Newburyport, MA
Time: 7:00-8:30 PM
Prices: Adults ($10), Students ($5) Plus $2 processing charge.
RAFFLE
There will be a raffle at the end of the lecture for:
A Girl and Her Room
Published by UMBRAGE EDITIONS
Essays by SUSAN MINOT and ANNE TUCKER
1 ticket for $1 — 5 tickets for $4 — 10 tickets for $8
About the book
Award-winning photographer Rania Matar’s A Girl and Her Room reveals the lives of girls from two disparate worlds – The U.S. and Lebanon. Set in the girls’ bedrooms – which range from spartan cleanliness to chaotic disarray – these portraits offer an insider’s perspective of not just who these young women are, but the physical spaces that prove to be extensions of their identities.
A Girl and Her Room is RANIA MATAR’s second book. Her first book, Ordinary Lives, was published in 2009.
SUSAN MINOT’s first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Rapture, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, and Poems 4 A.M., and wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty.
ANNE TUCKER is the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, a department she founded in 1976, and has authored a number of books.
