Jordan Nassar

Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York City; lives/works: New York City) is a visual artist working primarily in hand embroidered textiles that intersect fields of craft, ethnicity, and the embedded notions of heritage and homeland.

Nassar examines conflicting issues of identity and cultural participation using geometric patterning adapted from symbols present in traditional Palestinian hand embroidery. Meticulously hand stitching compositions across carefully designed patterns, he roots his practice in a linguistic and geopolitical field of play characterized by both conflict and unspoken harmony.

Approaching traditional craft more as a medium than a topic, Nassar explores the intricacies of his Palestinian-American history and identity through recourse to subjects such as cultural exchange and absorption, diasporic nostalgia for the ancestral homeland, and inherited symbols, codes, and language systems.

Nassar’s textile works operate between representational and geometric abstraction, often including fictive landscapes of Palestine. The artist explains, “I like to discuss these landscapes as versions of Palestine as they exist in the minds of the diaspora, who have never been there and may never be able to go there. They are the Palestine I heard stories about growing up, half-made of imagination. They are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical—beautiful and romantic, but bittersweet.”

His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA, USA; North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston Salem, NC, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, USA; Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design Honolulu, HI, USA; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; Bainbridge House, Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ, USA; Abrons Art Center, New York, NY, USA; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, USA; as well as at art galleries including The Third Line, Dubai, UAE; James Cohan Gallery, New York, NY, USA ; and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Nassar was awarded the 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant.