JORDAN NASSAR

Early Years

Jordan Nassar was born in New York City in 1985 to a Polish-American mother and a Palestinian-American father who had worked as a doctor in Palestine. He has talked about listening to his father’s pro-Palestine views in the context of the pro-Israel environment where he lived. He visited Palestine as a teenager but when he began dating his husband, an Israeli, he visited Israel. Nassar decided to become an artist after working at a gallery in Berlin, learning about contemporary artists and also art history. He began engaging with Palestinian craft because it was “a way for me to start thinking about how it is that I’m Palestinian, what that means to me, to my identity, and to my experience being a Palestinian member of the diaspora in America, not having been raised there”.

Jordan Nassar: Artworks

Nassar’s practice began with tatreez hand-embroidery but has expanded into work with glass beads, mother-of-pearl inlaid wood and installations. His engagement with traditional craft techniques comes through his own personal lens: creating connections to homeland that may be fantastical but also rooted in ancestry. It is important to him to collaborate directly with producers of craft in and around Palestine, from embroiderers in the West bank to Armenian ceramicists in Jerusalem.

• Nassar’s early embroideries used patterns he copied from books. “I learned each pattern comes from a village but I’m not from a village, I’m from New York,” he has said. “So I made up a bunch of patterns that look like Palestinian embroidery that don’t exist there as a way for a Palestinian in New York to participate.”
• 2022’s Song of the Flowers comprised 57 separately embroidered and stretched canvases in different shapes and sizes. The traditionally patterned panels were embroidered by Palestinian women, and Nassar created the landscape panels.
• Is the Sky Meant to be Wide Open? (2024) features a three-panel embroidery and a bench inlaid with mother-of-pearl and brass in a grapevine design. Among the grapes, he hid the word “Huriya”, meaning “freedom”.

Jordan Nassar: Select Exhibitions

Select Solo Exhibitions

• Jordan Nassar, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2027)
• Jordan Nassar, The Third Line, Dubai (2026)
• Revelation, James Cohan, New York City (2025)
• There, The Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg (2025)
• Surge, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2024) * A Mountain Looms, James Cohan, New York City (2023)
• Fantasy and Truth, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2022)
• A Sun to Come, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2022)
• To Light the Sky, James Cohan, New York City (2022)
• Lē’ahi’, Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture and Design, Honolulu (2022)
• The Field is Infinite, KMAC Museum, Louisville (2020)
• I Cut the Sky in Two, James Cohan, New York City (2020)
• We Are the Ones to Go to the Mountains, Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles (2020)
• Between Sky and Earth, Bainbridge House, Princeton University (2019)
• The Sea Beneath Our Eyes, Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2019)
• Israel For Your Eyes, The Third Line, Dubai (2019)
• Dunya, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2017)
• Jaffa: New Works, Artport Tel Aviv (2017)
• No Secret with Mika Horibuchi, LVL3 Gallery, Chicago (2016)
• And a Night, Evelyn Yard, London (2015)

Select Group Exhibitions

• In a Free State, Luhring Augustine, New York City (2026)
• All About 25, James Cohan, New York City (2025)
• Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan, New York City (2024)
• Fabric, Peter Blum Gallery, New York City (2023)
• Picturing Motherhood Now: Images for a New Era, Cleveland Museum of Art (2021)
• Home is Not a Place, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles (2019)
• A Matter of Printing, Supportico Lopez, Berlin (2018)
• Summer Reading, Fortnight Institute, New York City (2016)
• Showroom Miami, SWGR Gallery, Miami, FL (2015)

Further Reading

• Jordan Nassar’s Instagram
• Jordan Nassar’s official website
• Artist profile page at Norr Cohan
• 2024 interview from art21

Jordan Nassar FAQs

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