On Streets, Within Rooms & Beyond Walls: A Presentation from Artist Rania Matar

In her role as a spring semester Mellon artist-in-residence, "Aftermath" photographer Rania Matar is collaborating with Dr. Irene Lopez, Kenyon College Associate Professor of Psychology, and her Clinical Psychology class in exploring the relationship of studio practice and social science research. In her photographic studio practice, Matar brings her Lebanese background to bear on the production of images that are simultaneously empathetic to cultural difference while highlighting humanity’s oneness. Her talk will address multiple bodies of work produced in the recent past and additional works from the series featured in the "Aftermath" exhibition. About the artist: Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. Originally trained as an architect, she works full time as a photographer, and started teaching photography in 2009 through workshops for teenage girls in Palestinian refugee camps. Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, most recently at the MFA, Boston in She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers From Iran and the Arab World, which toured to the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington DC. Additionally, Matar has been featured in exhibitions at Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; Galerie Janine Rubeiz, Beirut; Galerie Eulenspiegel, Basel; Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, Germany; Sharjah Art Museum; National Portrait Gallery in London, among others. She has won numerous awards and a mid-career retrospective of Matar’s work is planned for the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (December 2017–May 2018). Matar has published three books: L’Enfant-Femme (2016), award-winning A Girl and Her Room (2012), and Ordinary Lives (2009) and her images are in the permanent collections of several museums, institutions and private collections worldwide. Three of her photographs were included in a recent promised gifts to the Gund Gallery Collection from David Horvitz ’74 and Francie Bishop Good. This exhibition is organized by the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida and made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harn 25th Anniversary Fund, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Joanne L. and Edward R. Block Charitable Trust, with additional support from the Harn Curator of Photography Endowment. Gund Gallery exhibitions and public programs are supported, in part, by the Gund Gallery Board of Directors and the Ohio Arts Council.