Girlhood and Womanhood Across Borders and Culture: Visiting Artist Rania Matar

The purpose of the series, as Visual Arts Department Chair Tim Clark said at an all-school assembly introducing Matar, is to present artists whose work has a meaningful impact on the community, sparks interaction and conversation, and brings new perspectives on art and art-making to campus, and to foster connections through community presentations, gallery receptions, and class visits.

On Tuesday, members of the Rivers community had an opportunity to engage in all three. 

Often drawing from her own experiences with her children, or fostering connections between American and Lebanese culture, Matar’s work portrays the humanity of the women she photographs even through the chaos—whether it is adolescence, political instability, motherhood, or just the challenges of everyday life. 

The core of Matar’s work focuses on telling the story of girls and women and exploring  

war, women’s stories, Lebanon, Palestinian refugees, and documenting the humanity of women across cultures and borders. Born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents, Matar emigrated to the US as a young adult and raised her four children not far from here. Global education intern Andrew Ho ’25 hosted a Q&A session with the artist, and Zayna Gilani ’27 and Jenna Adams ’28 introduced the artist at Tuesday’s assembly.

In the assembly presentation, Matar projected images of her work and spoke about becoming a photographer and the motivation behind creating each of her series—four of which she has published as books (with a fifth due to be released in February).   

When she first started taking pictures, Matar discovered “the kind of pictures I ended up taking are very different from the photos I thought I would be taking.” Her work, she says, highlights the beauty in everyday mundane moments—photographing people and their surroundings as they are and letting the context speak through the lens. 

“As soon as I started looking at life through my viewfinder, I realized the moments I thought were crazy were actually really beautiful,” she said.

Her portraits often feature a single subject—a woman or girl—requiring a kind of intimacy, which in many occasions has resulted in long-term relationships over time. She spoke of a young woman, Samira, whom she has gone back to photograph many times over the course of her life. She showed a series of portraits —some in the U.S., some in Lebanon—of girls in early puberty, which she was drawn to when her own daughters were of a similar age, again through the lens of cross-cultural humanity and understanding. And when her oldest daughter was about to go to college, Matar began a series of mother-daughter portraits, collaborating with them to create poignant images. 

One of her exhibits at Rivers, “A Girl and Her Room,” focuses on teenage girls in their bedrooms—and what they choose to surround themselves with. The portraits span from the nearby Brookline, MA, to girls of the same age in homes in Lebanon or in Palestinian refugee camps. “It’s reflective of my own identity from two cultures,” Matar said of the work. “I saw myself in these women.”

In the Bell Gallery, her exhibit “Where Do I Go? 50 Years Later” explores young women in Lebanon, 50 years after the civil war there. “That is the war that defined who I am,” said Matar. “I see myself in all of those young women: Do I stay, do I go? Every one of them has a narrative.” 

As she writes in the artist notes, “The women, the land, the architecture are intertwined. The collaboration is intense, creative, emotional, and personal.”

In the Q&A session and gallery reception, Matar spoke with students and community members in front of the artwork, sharing details behind the creation of each of the photographs. In one photograph in the Bell Gallery, a woman stands, seemingly barefoot, on a pile of rubble. At a closer glance, however, you can see a sandal on one of her feet.

“There’s something so natural about being barefoot,” Matar said. ”The shoe was interrupting the physicality, so I grabbed it before we took the photo,” to achieve the long line of the leg. 

In the classroom portion of the visit, Matar visited the grade 12 elective Mad Women, taught by Meghan Brown. The class has been engaged in discussions around social norms and expectations for women and the consequences for women who break out of those norms. In the Bell Gallery, students in the class were asked to select a photograph that resonated with them the most and stand beside it. Said Brown, Matar “emphasized the way these photos of individual women help to challenge reductive narratives of womanhood in the Middle East. I think my students were really able to appreciate the diversity of experiences in the lives of women through Rania's photographs.”

Matar also visited Sophie Lane’s photography class later in the day, where the artist offered feedback on the students’ portfolios—commenting on everything from lighting, choice of wardrobe (avoid branded logos, or anything too dark or too bright), cropping (“always scan all the edges of the frame when creating the image”) and exposure. 

Matar’s work is technically accomplished, of course, and her oversized prints make forceful, dramatic statements. But the photos’ power derives from their unique blend of the personal and the public. As she told the morning assembly, her inspiration is close to home, even when her subjects span the globe. “I always start with showing photos of my children,” she said to begin the presentation. ”They pave the way to everything, and they taught me so much about my work moving forward.”