Jordan Nassar, A Mountain Looms

Jordan Nassar, A Mountain Looms, 2023, hand-embroidered cotton on cotton, 213.4 x 213.4 x 2.5 cm (Courtesy of Private Collection and Jordan Nassar; photo: Dan Bradica) © Jordan Nassar

Tile Panel, c. 1650–1700, stone paste and paint, 135.1 x 136 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

In A Mountain Looms, Palestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar stitches together an abstracted image of his father’s ancestral homeland. The work comprises sixteen panels, each hand-embroidered in cotton threads of red, black, and blue. Their geometric patterns are precise and densely-packed in a manner consistent with much Islamicate decorative art, from textiles to tilework. The piece makes little use of negative space, save for the border of unembellished cotton canvas that frames each square. Our eye is drawn to the individual panels and the intricate details of their embroidery. Only from a distance do the tiles reveal a cohesive image: the silhouette of a rocky mountain set against a patterned sky.

Born and raised in Manhattan, Nassar works in the centuries-old Palestinian tradition of tatreez (embroidery) to create elaborate compositions that capture the experience of living in diaspora. Nassar created A Mountain Looms in 2023 in collaboration with Palestinian craftswomen living and working in the West Bank. This colorfully embroidered polyptych illustrates how Nassar’s engagement with the living history of Palestinian craft traditions both preserves and strengthens cultural ties across distance, displacement, and difference.

Bethlehem Moon and Feather tatreez motif (detail), Jordan Nassar, A Mountain Looms, 2023, hand-embroidered cotton on cotton, 213.4 x 213.4 x 2.5 cm (Courtesy of Private Collection and Jordan Nassar; photo: Dan Bradica) © Jordan Nassar

Tradition and contemporaneity

Nassar picked up tatreez as “a crafty, flamingly gay kid basically trying to find [his] place in a diaspora family.” [1] With no one to teach him tatreez first-hand, Nassar mastered the craft by copying patterns in handbooks. When Nassar learned that most patterns are unique to and nameable by the Palestinian village from which they originate, he began to create his own arrangements. In an interview, Nassar said, “I learned each pattern comes from a village, but I’m not from a village. I’m from New York. 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.” [2]

Mimar Sinan, mihrab and minbar, Rüstem Paşa Mosque, Istanbul, 1561–63 (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

A Mountain Looms combines traditional tatreez motifs, like the Damask Rose and the Bethlehem Moon and Feather, with Nassar’s more novel additions, including distinctive blue-and-black curvilinear patterns arranged across a diagonal set of four tiles that extend from the top left corner to the bottom right. While these embroidered designs clearly recall the blue-and-white ceramic tiles that still embellish Ottoman-era mosques (such as the Rüstem Paşa Mosque in Istanbul) and palaces, they also evoke the computer-age aesthetics that Nassar frequently engages in his broader multi-disciplinary practice, comprising t-shirts, zines, and mixtapes.

Blue-and-black curvilinear design (center) with Bethlehem Moon and Feather (left) and Damask Rose (right) motifs (detail), Jordan Nassar, A Mountain Looms, 2023, hand-embroidered cotton on cotton, 213.4 x 213.4 x 2.5 cm (Courtesy of Private Collection and Jordan Nassar; photo: Dan Bradica) © Jordan Nassar

As Nassar explains, cross-stitching is “in a way, the first pixelation”: much like the pixel, the stitch is a modular unit that, when repeated, functions as a building block for a larger visual composition. [3] By drawing this comparison between the stitch and pixel, Nassar challenges the perception of Palestinian arts—and by extension, Palestinian identity—as relics of a nearly-forgotten past. Instead, Nassar demonstrates that tatreez is a dynamic and evolving practice, one that remains deeply relevant to both contemporary Palestinian culture and global contemporary art.

Cypress motif on the back of a Palestinian thobe, Traditional Dress (Thobe), early 20th century (pre-1920s), cotton, taffeta, atlas silk, and silk embroidery, 139 x 122 cm (Brooklyn Museum)

Tatreez after 1948

For generations, the tatreez stitches on a Palestinian woman’s thobe (dress) indicated her position (as a daughter, wife, or mother), her family, or her village. These patterns, some of which date to the late 18th century, were passed down matrilineally through oral transmission and hands-on learning. An individual dressmaker would often modify patterns to reflect her lived experiences, adorning her thobe with images from her everyday surroundings. One dress from the Al-Khalil area, for example, features regional variations on the popular “ears of corn” and “cypress tree” motifs, connecting the wearer to the natural landscape of her home; many of these floral or vegetal patterns also served symbolic functions, with the stately cyprus tree representing longevity and resilience.

Beginning in the mid-20th century, as the Arab-Israeli Wars dramatically reshaped Palestinian life and land, tatreez gained new political significance. In 1948, during the creation of the State of Israel, over 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their homes, and at least another 15,000 were killed. These events, which led to the depopulation of more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages, are remembered in Arabic as al-Nakba, meaning literally “the catastrophe.” After al-Nakba, Palestinian refugees living in neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria used tatreez to stay connected to their distant homeland. During this time, dressmakers began sharing patterns that had once been specific to individual villages across different regional communities; these designs blended and evolved across the broader community of displaced Palestinians in refugee camps, resulting in a reimagining of traditional styles.

Intifada thobe, late 20th century, factory woven cloth, hand embroidered (cross stitch), 133 x 50 cm (Textile Research Centre, Leiden)

In the aftermath of the First Intifada some forty years later, women still living in occupied Palestine began embroidering their thobes with stitches of red, green, and black. Sometimes called intifada thobes, these garments became a subversive way to evoke the Palestinian flag, which Israel first outlawed in 1967 (that year, during the Six-Day War, the State of Israel claimed control over Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as well as the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, bringing more than one million Palestinians in these occupied territories under Israeli rule). The display of the flag in public spaces was prohibited until 1993. Today, artisans continue to integrate contemporary colorways and new designs into traditional forms much in the same way that Nassar imagines new tatreez patterns for his global village of diasporic Palestinians.

Land and landscape in the diaspora

The image spanning Nassar’s sixteen panels is a simplified mountainscape. Although its craggy outline echoes the stone terraces characteristic of Palestine’s central highlands, the titular mountain does not clearly represent any specific or identifiable location. Rather, A Mountain Looms invokes an imagined Palestine, one that lives in the hearts and minds of those in the diaspora. The Palestine Nassar portrays here is reconstructed from the memories of his Palestinian-American father, which are themselves distorted by time, distance, and a sense of longing. This complex relationship to place is, as Palestinian cultural critic and theorist Edward Said notes, emblematic of the diasporic experience. He writes, “When we cross from Palestine into other territories, even if we find ourselves decently in new places, the old ones loom behind us as tangible and unreal as reproduced memory or absent causes for our present state.” [4] The centrality of place to the diasporic experience, as well as to contemporary Palestinian geopolitics, has made landscape a central and recurring subject in Nassar’s work.

A queer lineage

Nassar frequently credits fellow queer Arab artist Etel Adnan with inspiring his fondness for landscape compositions. Like Nassar, Adnan was also a part of the Arab diaspora. Born in Lebanon to a Greek mother and Syrian father, she spent much of her adult life between Beirut, Paris, and Northern California. In the 1950s, Adnan began a series of vibrant landscapes, abstracted into rudimentary shapes and often painted in just three or four colors; many featured a mountain at their center. Nassar’s tatreez works make clear formal references to Adnan’s influence, some even taking their titles from lines of her poetry. By referencing and reimaging Adnan’s mountainscapes through the medium of tatreez, Nassar positions his work within an art historical lineage that is at once Palestinian and queer.

Etel Adnan, Untitled, c. 1960s, oil on canvas mounted to board, 47 x 53.5 cm (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) © Estate of Etel Adnan

While neither Adnan’s nor Nassar’s unpopulated mountainscapes explicitly visualize a queer subject, both can be understood as objects of a queer contemporary art. In scholarship, as in many people’s lived experiences, queerness is a matter of disrupting traditional binaries and boundaries—not only in terms of gender and sexuality, but also race, nationality, ability, and identity more broadly. Similarly, these artists’ ambiguous landscapes collapse dichotomous boundaries between “here” and “there.” We can not tell, for example, if Adnan’s mountains belong to the Lebanese countryside or the California coastline. Nassar’s tatreez works also challenge art historical binaries: between craft and fine art; textile and painting; even tradition and contemporaneity. They may also be understood as traversing certain gendered boundaries, as they are created in collaboration with a community of Palestinian artisans historically made up of women.

A Mountain Looms also plays with the idea of duality on a formal level. At first glance, Nassar’s stitches appear to be just two colors: red and blue. Looking more closely, we see the subtle variations in color that lend the work its visual complexity: the threads are vibrant pink, peach, pale blue, cerulean, and even black. These tonal shifts reveal a spectrum rather than a strict binary. In this way, the work’s composition mirrors its thematic concerns, suggesting that what may seem dichotomous—in color, identity, or place—is often in fact fluid and even interwoven.