Rania Matar
My work addresses the states of 'Becoming'– the fraught beauty and the vulnerability of growing up – in the context of the visceral relationships to our physical environment and universal humanity, but it is also about collaboration and empowerment. As a mother of two beautiful young women in their twenties, I am interested in exploring what it is like to be a girl and a woman today, in a world that poses endless questions on girls and women of all backgrounds. As adulthood starts setting in, young women everywhere – including my daughters – have to face a new reality they are often not prepared for, a humbling reality that is not nearly as glamorous as the one portrayed on social media. How do they adjust to the challenges of growing up in real life? How do they learn to live and love the life that is in front of them in real place and time? In the immediate future, they can vote and make their voices heard.
Voting is a right that they (we) have earned, thanks to hundreds on women who marched for this right, demanded it and made it happen. It is a right no woman today should take for granted. For A Yellow Rose Project, I photographed young women, most of them voting in the presidential election for first time, at this historic moment of our history, which happens to serendipitously coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the suffragettes movement. I gathered a quote from all those young women on why it was important for them to express their concerns and vote this year.
(Click and hover over images for quotes)
Rania Matar was born and raised in Lebanon and moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely published and exhibited in museums worldwide, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Carnegie Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, American University of Beirut Museum, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections. A mid-career retrospective of her work was recently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art: In Her Image: Photographs by Rania Matar.
She has received several grants and awards including 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 associate professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Portrait by Helena Goessens
instagram: @raniamatar
