The Brooklyn Rail

Tatreez, a traditional Palestinian form of embroidery, often revolves around biographical details. When incorporated into clothing, the sequence of stitches provide clues about the wearer’s background, social status, or phase of life. Initially, Jordan Nassar embraced this traditional craft to reflect on the complications of his own diasporic life and bridge the gaps between his personal history, family heritage, and suppressed sense of homeland pride. The artist, a second-generation Palestinian and Polish-American, was born and raised in New York City; his paternal grandfather left Palestine for America as a teenager, and, later, Nassar’s father became a celebrated doctor specializing in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in America and abroad, including in Gaza and the West Bank.

Listening to his father recount his firsthand experiences led Nassar to reevaluate the dominant narrative surrounding Middle Eastern conflict, as did visits to the region years later. In earlier works, he experimented with devising unique tatreez motifs to communicate New York City as one’s birthplace, unaware that, because of mass displacement, traditional patterns have been widely adopted no matter one’s geographical origin. Now, in large-scale, mural-like works that have characterized Nassar’s recent output, his embroidered portrayals of mountain landscapes, crafted to visually emerge from age-old designs, are integrated into larger patterned assemblages created in collaboration with craftswomen from the West Bank. One of these works, Shade of the Cypress (2023), is the centerpiece of THERE, his current exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem. Comprising fifty-seven embroidered canvas panels, Cypress resembles an abstract fresco or a symmetrical constellation of decorative tiles, extending from the floor to the ceiling of the corner gallery. The more geometric ones—traditionally Palestinian designs with evocative names like “Sugar on a Plate,” “Bethlehem Moon” and “Damascus Rose”—were created by craftswomen in Bethlehem, Hebron, and Ramallah, based on Nassar’s initial sketches and direction. Resplendent cross-stitches made by the artist in his Brooklyn studio pepper the arrangement, with the same traditional patterns altered to read, from a distance, as maroon, goldenrod, and cherry blossom pink mountain silhouettes framed by a seafoam green sky. Pieced together, the work reflects an ongoing dialogue about Palestinian customs and ways of life—a conversation that spans generations, languages, and transcontinental locales.

Now, in light of current events, Nassar’s singular landscapes have become his exhibition’s foundation. Aside from the aforementioned Cypress, North Carolina’s THERE brings together ten of the artist’s single-panel embroidery works, sparsely hung salon-style, on the gallery’s two remaining walls. Despite their crowded portrayals depicting abundant natural phenomena, seeing the panels one by one underscores their loneliness. They read like multiple memories, fantasies, collapsing into one, foregrounded by traditional patterns harkening to place and origin. In Oh the sun at an angle (2024), Nassar employs a stitch design called “Damascus Rose” to depict the prominent star at two spots in the day, with yellow beams giving way to a swath of baby blue as the couplet of orange and pink spheres bounce around the picture plane. In the piece On the pleated horizon (2024), fourteen peaks of various colors—including navy, crimson, Kelly green, lavender, and desert sand, made from the “Sugar on a Plate” motif—are stacked atop one another, resembling more of a ripple rather than a mountain range.

Nassar’s panels evoke a vision of Palestine rooted in the diasporic imagination. Inspired by interactions with other displaced Palestinians who could only engage with the country from a temporal or physical distance, Nassar’s stitched, patterned scenes communicate a longing. A dream of a country as it once was, a nostalgic view of beauty before it was ruined, bombed, destroyed. Rather than focusing on the grim realities, he posits a manifestation via a recollection of a paradise.

Formally, these works showcase the oversized influence of Lebanese-American artist and poet Etel Adnan (1925–2021) on Nassar, especially evident from both artists’ preoccupation with depicting contoured terrain and color block hills. But a deeper engagement drives Nassar, and THERE points at some of the rabbit holes he’s recently traveled down, looking to Adnan’s prodigious oeuvre to help him express frustrations and confusion while also surmising a way forward.

The exhibition takes its name from Adnan’s 1997 prose poem THERE: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and of the Other, a meditation on conflict that challenges the idea of “the other,” the “over there,” and wrestles with the impact of constant destruction and the effect of power imbalances on one’s psyche. “It rained blood,” Adnan wrote in the early pages. “Holy cities caved in. Nobody watched the fires. Our imagination survived the onslaught; why it inflicted upon itself such terror we can’t comprehend.” The language of THERE is visceral and emotive, and its circular logic reminds the reader that conflict can be claustrophobic. Even when one tries to take a break, rest, or find distance, abuses of authority and systematic hierarchies keep one ensnared. Nassar and exhibition curator Jared Ledesma smartly and subtly echo this feeling by installing the show in the low-ceiling back corner of the museum’s Potter Gallery, making poignant use of an often tricky space.

THERE comes at a time when images, videos, and civilian reports of ongoing warfare and genocide flood social media timelines, sometimes, but not often, echoed by larger media outlets. There are accounts of near-constant bombings decimating whole towns, relentless and vicious attacks on the innocent, instances of humanitarian aid being withheld, and, overall, the deafening cry of a struggle that feels never-ending, one whose stakes feel more dire as the days go by. Pining for a picturesque Palestine now makes Nassar’s poetic and dream-like threaded illustrations read as elegiac, bittersweet, and primarily solemn.

Or, perhaps, the viewer can see his embroideries reflecting a sense of hopeful yearning. Facing the glare of the stark walls, one could yearn for the day when Nassar’s sprawl of newer works can reunite with contributions from craftswomen in the West Bank, marking a ceasefire, a burgeoning resolve, and a number of significant relationships forged again. One could yearn for the day, too, when his rosy landscapes reflect truth, recognized existence, and fresh possibilities instead of misty-eyed memories.