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| Lament of the Field, detail. |
Recently, DH and I journeyed to the booming Seaport area of Boston to see Jordan Nassar - Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, on view through January 29, 2023.
The exhibit features embroidery made monumental. From the wall text:
Jordan Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) is a multidisciplinary Palestinian-American artist who works in traditional Palestinian craft. His embroideries, many of which he creates in collaboration with craftswomen in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem, combine regional motifs with imagined landscapes. A self-taught artist, Nassar is know for his use of Palestinian tatreez (a form of cross-stitch embroidery), through which colors, patterns, and designs distinguish a wearer both by their origins and their social or familial status, and can signal different stages of life. A thousands-of-years-old tradition, tatreez has strong ties to Palestinian nostalgia, nationality, and heritage.
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| Gallery overview. |
The exhibit occupies one gallery and also features Nassar's forays into wood marquetry and glass bead manipulation, but for me it's all about the stitching, which utilizes cotton embroidery floss on cotton cloth. The panels featuring traditional motifs are "interrupted" by stitched landscapes, through which Nassar succeeds in expanding this tradition into a modern cultural expression. The traditional panels and the landscapes play off each other as foils; each made livelier by the adjacency of the other. Each traditional panel features four analogous colors while the landscape panels introduce complementary hues and additional colors not seen elsewhere.
The titles of the two works are from a book of poetry, A Tear and A Smile by Lebanese-American author Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931),
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| Song of the Flowers, 2022. |
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| Lament of the Field, 2022. |
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| Viewers give some idea of the scale of these panels. |
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| Detail, landscape panel, Song of the Flowers. |
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| Close-up of cross-stitching, Song of the Flowers. |
The motifs in the more traditional panels have specific meanings or references but these were not identified in the exhibit. At the end of this blog I've listed some books which give more information on tatreez, which the UN has designated as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.
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| Detail, Song of the Flowers. |
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| Detail, Lament of the Field. |
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| Detail, Lament of the Field. |
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| Detail, Lament of the Field. |
By varying the color within motifs - Nassar's signature style - curvilinear patterns can be created, as in the moon above, and its counterpart, the sun, below.
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| Detail, Song of the Flowers. |
To learn more about Palestinian embroidery:
(Note - some of the books are out of print and/or hard to source.)
Ghnaim, Wafa. Tea and Tatreez.
Kamel, Widad. Threads of Identity.
Skinner, Margarita. Palestinian Embroidery Motifs: A Treasury of Stitches.
Weir, Shelagh. Palestinian Embroidery.
