MCLA Gallery 51 to Host Artist Talk and Book Signing with Photographer Lydia Panas June 3

May 20, 2022

MCLA Arts and Culture (MAC) will host an artist talk and book signing with photographer Lydia Panas from 5-7 p.m. on Friday, June 3, at MCLA Gallery 51 on Main Street in North Adams. A screening of Panas’ work will follow at MASS MoCA from 9-10 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.  

Panas’ recent work, “Sleeping Beauty” a series of photographs and video installations, has been exhibited across the country. This widely praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls reverses roles, with the artist’s and models’ gazes intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection.  

After an artist talk at 5:30 p.m., Panas will sign copies of “Sleeping Beauty,” which was named one of the best photography books of 2021 by PopPhoto.   

More about Lydia Panas 

Lydia Panas is a visual artist working with photography and video. A first-generation American, she was raised between Greece and the United States. Through a combination of psychoanalysis and feminism, her work looks at identity and what lies below the surface, investigating questions of who we are and what we want to become. Exploring the roles of power and trust on both sides of the camera, she describes what it feels like to be a woman, a human, and the complex range of emotions we have the capacity to feel. All her work is made in the fields, the forests, and the studio of her seventy-acre farm in Pennsylvania. The connection she feels to this land and her family is the foundation of her work. 

Panas’ work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her photographs are represented in public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Palm Springs Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, and the Sheldon Museum among others. Her work has appeared in many periodicals such as The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, French Photo, and Hyperallergic. Panas has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, and New York University/International Center of Photography. She is the recipient of a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship and a CFEVA Fellowship. She has three monographs, “The Mark of Abel” (Kehrer Verlag 2012), “Falling from Grace” (Conveyor Arts 2016) and, “Sleeping Beauty” (MW Editions 2021). 

About MCLA Arts & Culture 

MCLA Arts and Culture (MAC) is MCLA’s newly expanded arts programming arm. MAC serves as the nexus for internal and external partnerships to create engaging and equity-focused projects that encourage public arts participation, as well as the investigation of arts-based pedagogy that can reshape institutional practices. MAC (formerly known as BCRC, the Berkshire Cultural Resource Center) functions as a hub that supports interdisciplinary approaches to education, social justice, and academic research across MCLA’s campus. MAC supports the expansion of MAC programing to include: faculty opportunities for interdisciplinary curriculum development; interdisciplinary faculty and student social justice research; arts and culture symposia and workshops; internships for underrepresented student communities; and the development of an open-access archive that includes documented community arts projects and support tools that other college campuses and communities can use and apply to fit their needs.