Lecture & Preview Party with Rania Matar for Rania Matar: SHE

Thursday, August 17 | 6 – 8 p.m.
Members: $60 | Non-Members: $100

Enjoy an exclusive first look at Rania Matar: SHE before it opens to the public. Rania Matar, the featured photographer, will lead the event with a lecture.

Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to the United States in 1984. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and adulthood. Matar works both in the United States and the Middle East in an effort to focus on notions of identity and individuality within the context of the underlying universality of these experiences.

SHE features 50 large-scale color images of young women in their 20s—the ages of Matar’s own daughters—leaving the cocoon of home and transitioning into womanhood. In earlier projects, Matar photographed young women in relation to the controlled environment of their bedrooms. Here, she captures them in the larger arena they find themselves in after leaving home—the global and complicated backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transition. Organized by The Museum Box LLC, Boston, MA.

Rania Matar has dedicated her photographic practice to exploring deeply personal narratives, drawing upon her multifaceted cultural background and cross-cultural experiences as a Lebanese-born American artist and mother. Her work explores issues of individual and collective identity, often through photographs of girls and women in the United States and the Middle East. Working in collaboration with her subjects to create intimate portraits, her work focuses on our shared humanity and emphasizes underlying similarities rather than apparent differences.

Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. during the Lebanese Civil War.  As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography. Matar was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and a Leica Women Foto Award in 2022. Her work has been widely published and exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums and private collections worldwide. She has published four books: SHE, L’Enfant-Femme, A Girl and Her Room, and Ordinary Lives.