Art Basel Miami Beach: Jordan Nassar

The Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar presents Rivers of Eden, an installation that evokes an imagined domestic space as inspired by the Garden of Eden, overlooking the fantastical expansive vista through embroideries-as-windows.

Nassar’s hand-embroidered textile pieces address an intersecting field of language, ethnicity, and embedded notions of heritage and homeland. Presented together, this suite of embroideries acts as windows, revealing a continuous panoramic scene that unfolds from one landscape into the next. These landscapes are fictional; collapsing distance, they cast the gaze toward imagined, utopic horizons. Nassar’s collaborative embroidered pieces present a dialogue between his own position as a young member of the Palestinian diaspora alongside a group of women in the West Bank, who he has closely partnered with in their creation.

Jordan Nassar (b. 1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; 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 Gallery, New York, NY; and The Third Line, Dubai, UAE. His work has been acquired by museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island, among others. Nassar lives and works in New York, NY.