Thursday, December 3, 2026
Doors at 5:30pm. Artist talk at 6pm.
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
On Thursday, December 3, we welcome Rania Matar to “Meet the Artist.” As a Lebanese-born American woman and mother, Matar has dedicated her artistic practice to exploring both sides of her cultural background, cross-cultural experience, and personal narrative, in addressing issues of personal and collective identity, through photographing girls and women both in the United States where she lives and in the Middle East where she is from. Throughout her work, and by making intimate portraits of girls and women, she seeks to focus on our essence, our physicality, and on the commonalities that make us human, to emphasize underlying similarities rather than apparent differences. Her photographs reveal the beauty in our shared humanity – in the universal as well as personal experience of women encountering the challenges of growing up regardless of background, culture, and religion.
Matar will have copies of her latest book Where Do I Go? for sale throughout the evening. This event will be live-streamed on CPW’s YouTube page at 6pm.
Join us on select Thursday evenings at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served.
“Meet the Artist” is made possible by generous grants from the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Born and raised in Lebanon, Rania Matar moved to the U.S. in 1984. As a Lebanese-Palestinian-American artist and mother, her cross-cultural experience and personal narrative inform her photography.
Matar’s work has been widely exhibited in museums worldwide in solo and group shows, including Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, LACMA, Carnegie Museum of Art, ICA/Boston, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fotografiska, Institut du Monde Arabe, and more. It is part of the permanent collections of several museums. A mid-career retrospective of her work was on view at Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and American University of Beirut Museum. Additional solo museum exhibitions include Middlebury Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Rollins Museum of Art, and The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum at Indiana University.
Matar received several awards including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Mellon Foundation artist-in-residency grant, 2021 (also 2011, 2007) Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grants, 2011 Griffin Museum of Photography Legacy Award, 2008 ICA/Boston Foster Prize. She was a finalist for the Oskar Barnack Award 2023, Arnold Newman Prize 2022, and Outwin Portrait Competition 2022 with an exhibition at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery/DC. She curated “Louder Than Hearts”, a group exhibition of women from the Arab World and Iran, Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. 2025. Matar published five books: Where Do I Go? 2026; SHE, 2021; L’Enfant-Femme, 2016; A Girl and Her Room, 2012; Ordinary Lives, 2009.
Banner image: Rania Matar, Mariam (Over the Border Wall), Kfarkila, Lebanon, 2022.