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Jordan Nassar

Biography

Jordan Nassar - Artists - James Cohan

Photo: Alexander Rotondo

Jordan Nassar’s multivalent art practice engages the material variety of craft to execute ideas centered on heritage and homeland. Through hand-embroidery, wood inlay, glass and expansive installations, he examines issues of identity, diaspora and cultural participation. Nassar often employs “the landscape” as a thread throughout these different mediums, carefully mapping out patterns and repeatedly intercepting them, using fields of color to define rolling hills and expanses of water.  

 

Nassar has adapted the matrilineally-learned tradition of Palestinian tatreez, or cross stitch—most often found on pillows, clothing, and other domestic arts—to mirror his hybridized upbringing. His childhood home in the U.S. was decorated with such objects, which his father brought back from visits to his ancestral homeland. Each hand-embroidered work is stretched and framed, bringing Nassar’s embroidery practice into a dialogue with painting. 

 

Nassar has created an important body of work in collaboration with craftswomen living and working in Ramallah, which juxtapose local traditions with a contemporary aesthetic. Beginning with a color palette of their own choosing on areas of the canvas predetermined by the artist, the craftswomen lay the foundations of his panoramas. Nassar then embroiders multicolored landscapes within these intricate geometric grids. 

 

The artist says of his imagined landscapes, “they’re conceptually linked to Palestine, a place where land is the crux of the issue, as well as growing up in the Palestinian-American diaspora, so they touch on the dreams of that place and the distance I feel from it. My work is personal and emotional, it comes from both places of joy and of pain…” 

 

Addressing the diasporic experience continues to be a throughline for Nassar. Recently, he has expanded his practice to include other traditional Palestinian, Levantine and Arab craft media. These include inlay brass and mother of pearl, three-dimensional sculptures made of hand-fired glass beads, and Byzantine-style smalti glass mosaics. For Nassar, these mediums are a means for connection to his identity. 

 

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY; Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; James Cohan, New York and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others. 

 

Jordan Nassar is the recipient of the 2022 Unbound United States Artists Fellowship in craft and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Grant. Recent notable solo exhibition's include Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2023 and THERE which traveled from NCMA Winston-Salem (formerly SECCA), North Carolina in 2024 to the Susquehanna Art Museum, Pennsylvania in 2025. 

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BiographyOLD

Jordan Nassar’s hand-embroidered pieces address intersecting fields of craft, ethnicity and the embedded notions of heritage and homeland. Treating traditional craft more as medium than topic, Nassar examines conflicting issues of identity and cultural participation using geometric patterning adapted from symbols and motifs present in traditional Palestinian hand embroidery. Meticulously hand stitching colorful compositions across carefully mapped-out patterns, he roots his practice in a geopolitical field of play characterized by both conflict and unspoken harmony.

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