©Lydia Panas, Lipstick, from Letters to My Mother

Lydia Panas created the series, Letters to My Mother during a 2019 residency at the American Academy in Rome. This body of work emerges from a period of emotional dislocation following the artist’s mother’s death. What begins as a private act of creating letters rendered as drawings, the series unfolds into a layered meditation on memory, loss, and the difficulty of articulation. Using lipstick as both mark and metaphor, alongside scrawled, intimate text, the artist draws on gestures historically coded as feminine to evoke presence and absence simultaneously. The resulting works include delicate drawings on vellum and tracing paper, large-scale photographs, and video, occupying a space between confession and concealment. In dialogue with her longstanding practice of creating visually seductive yet psychologically charged images, this project turns inward, revealing a more immediate and vulnerable language shaped by grief, resistance, and the enduring tension between what can be seen and what remains unspoken.

Letters to My Mother

I made this work as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome in 2019. Feeling unmoored after my mother died, I began writing letters to her in the form of drawings—words I had been unable to convey in person. The drawings include impressions that echo the way women in the 1960s and 70s pressed their lips onto tissue after applying lipstick.

When I returned from Rome, I put the drawings away, unsure of their value. Seeing them again, I recognized how deeply they connect to my practice.
This project brings together drawings on tracing paper and vellum, large-scale photographs of lipstick impressions, and videos. It explores memory, loss, and the shifting boundary between private and public expression, extending my ongoing interest in the tension between what is seen and what is felt.

Over the past thirty years, I have created lush, Renaissance-inspired images—portraits and still-lifes that are restrained, pensive, and psychologically charged. Direct and visually seductive, they become uncomfortable, even unnerving, the longer one looks. What appears straightforward begins to shift.

I had to refuse what I was taught as a girl; saying no was how I survived. The work begins there.

Letters to My Mother includes twenty-five drawings, nine 46 x 38” pigment prints, and ten videos.

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

Lydia Panas works with photography and video. Her work has been exhibited widely, at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, Artists’ Space, Phillips Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Palm Springs Art Museum, Art Museum of the Americas, Allentown Art Museum, Sheldon Museum, National Portrait Gallery, London and Edinburgh, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Museum of Modern Art, Tbilisi, and Zendai MoMA, among others.
Her works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Palm Springs Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, among others

Her photographs have appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Hyperallergic, PDN, French Photo, Die Volkskrant, GEO Wissen, and Haaretz, among others.

Panas has a BA in Psychology from Boston College, a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, and an MA from New York University. She has received a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship and a CFEVA Fellowship and has been an Artist-in-Residence at MASS MoCA, Banff Centre for the Arts, and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome. Panas has published three monographs: “The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag 2012), “Falling from Grace” (Conveyor Arts 2016), and “Sleeping Beauty” (MW Editions 2021).

She divides her time between a farm in Pennsylvania and New York City.

Instagram: lydiapanas_

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, Video Still, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, Lipstick, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, Lipstick, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, Lipstick, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, Lipstick, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, Lipstick, from Letters to my Mother

©Lydia Panas, from Letters to my Mother