Jordan Nassar @ James Cohan Gallery, NYC - "REVELATION" Exhibition

Jordan Nassar

REVELATION

James Cohan Gallery, New York

September 5 - October 4, 2025

Jordan Nassar

Photo by Takamasa Ota

James Cohan presents REVELATION, an exhibition of new work by JORDAN NASSAR at the gallery’s 48 Walker Street location. This is Nassar’s fourth solo exhibition with James Cohan. 

In REVELATION, Jordan Nassar reimagines traditional craft techniques across expansive multipanel embroideries and transportative mosaics to explore inherited nostalgia, history, and heritage. His recent embroideries are poignant meditations on color, as well as light and darkness; they reveal and conceal brilliantly-hued landscapes. In the front gallery, mosaics echoing Byzantine ruins wrap around the walls, eliciting the past in a contemporary site.

Jordan Nassar’s intricately hand-stitched works were made with the participation of Palestinian craftswomen living and working in Bethlehem, Ramallah, and Hebron. Notably, the geometric motifs extend across the entire plane of the canvases, creating dense walls of patterning that obscure imagined vistas. The shadowy palette of these works reflects a somber reverence, one that is punctuated by moments of brightness. A valley lit by a glowing crimson sun emerges from shades of gray in the aptly named Between Two Hedges of Silence, 2025. The artwork titles, as well as that of the exhibition, were inspired by Etel Adnan’s epic poem, The Arab Apocalypse. Jordan Nassar draws on the close linguistic connection between the Greek etymology of apocalypse with the act of unveiling [from apokaluptein, ’to uncover, to reveal’]. Viewers are granted a window of what lies beyond from multiple vantage points and perspectives. 

Alongside these embroideries, the artist has reconstructed two archaeological antiquities, employing the ancient method of hand-cutting glass. The originals are displayed in the arrivals corridor at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv as a welcome marker. The first is a fragment of a mosaic floor from a 5th-6th century Byzantine structure attributed to BethLehem of the Galilee; in this installation it is intentionally flipped on its side. Jordan Nassar has depicted its flora and fauna, mirroring its design and formal qualities, to vividly bring this ruin to life. He also asserts his own aesthetic choices, filling in eroded areas with exotic animals and curving grape vines that nod to the intricate Shellal mosaic excavated from the Wadi Ghuzze riverbed and now housed in the Australian War Memorial. 

Jordan Nassar describes “the act of remaking them as a tender gesture,” reframing the historical lineage of the craft as he interprets it. Bisan (Blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out) (Deuteronomy 28:6), 2025, is the artist’s translation of a square mosaic from the historic city of the same name, decorated heavily with birds with ribbons tied around their napes. Here, Jordan Nassar has unbridled the birds of their ribbons. Ultimately, Jordan Nassar raises questions about the underlying symbolism of ruins, the implicit power that they project and the narratives they can be used to construct and uphold.

Artist Jordan Nassar

Jordan Nassar (b.1985, New York, NY) earned his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. Recent notable solo exhibitions include Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston in 2023 and THERE in 2024-2025, which traveled from NCMA Winston-Salem (formerly SECCA) in North Carolina to the Susquehanna Art Museum in Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in exhibitions globally at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Asia Society, New York, NY; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, among others.

Jordan Nassar is represented in numerous permanent collections including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; The Museum of Contemporary Art, California; and Rhode Island School of Design Museum, in Rhode Island. Nassar is the recipient of several awards including the 2022 Unbound United States Artists Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Grant.

JAMES COHAN

48 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.jamescohan.com

State Fairs: Growing American Craft @ Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington

State Fairs: Growing American Craft

Renwick Gallery of the SAAM, Washington

August 22, 2025 - September 7, 2026

Liz Schreiber

State Fairs: Growing American Craft, 2024-2025

Various seeds and flower petals 

Courtesy of Liz Schreiber

State fairs have sparked the American imagination with their celebrations of agricultural bounty, mechanical innovations and skilled handcrafts since the first fair was held in 1841 in upstate New York. Craft has always been an essential element of state fairs and Native American tribal fairs, expressing the creative and practical values of handmade goods in American society. State fairs enable artists to display and sell their work and help sustain unique regional and cultural traditions.  

State Fairs: Growing American Craft will occupy both floors of the Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s branch location for contemporary craft. It is the first exhibition dedicated to artists’ contributions to the great U.S. tradition of state fairs. With more than 240 artworks on view, dating from the mid-19th century to the present, this exhibition registers the many ways the craft of state fairs has enriched the lives of artists and deepened the understanding of American art.

The exhibition is the culmination of five years of on-the-ground research involving visits to 15 state fairs across the U.S.; collaborative projects with artists in Kentucky, New Jersey, Alaska, West Virginia and Utah; and research in several state historical societies, history museums and archives. Artists and 4-H clubs from 43 states and tribal nations are represented, with all 50 states represented in a photo gallery.  

“‘State Fairs’ showcases what the team at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery does best—it is the latest in a series of exhibitions that reassess and uplift craft’s relevance to our everyday lives and American culture,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, Acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “To spotlight these extraordinary and often under-sung artists is an unparalleled opportunity for audiences to deepen and expand perceptions of craft in the United States.”

Visitors will enjoy show-stopping spectacles like the iconic size 96 boots of Big Tex (a 55-foot statue known as the world’s tallest cowboy) from the State Fair of Texas, a life-size butter cow created on-site by the Iowa State Fair’s official butter sculptor Sarah Pratt and a display featuring a pyramid of 700 glass jars of preserved fruits and vegetables by canning superstar Rod Zeitler. Additional highlights include sculptor Robert Arneson’s break from functional ceramics during a pottery demonstration at the 1961 California State Fair, Lillian Colton’s groundbreaking crop-art portrait of Richard Nixon, regalia from pageants hosted by Indigenous fairs, benches commissioned from craft students at Kentucky’s Berea College, a 1965 butter-carton dress created by the Minnesota State Fair’s Princess Kay of the Milky Way (the goodwill ambassador for Minnesota’s dairy farmers) and much more.

To complement the exhibition, the museum debuts a new site-specific installation by artist Justin Favela in the Renwick Gallery’s Rubenstein Grand Salon.

“The first state fair I attended as a child was the Minnesota State Fair, which we called the Great Minnesota Get-Together,” said Mary Savig, the Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft. “While organizing this exhibition over the past several years, I experienced firsthand the collective spirit of artists getting together at state fairs across the country, sharing their talents and memories with fellow fairgoers. ‘State Fairs: Growing American Craft’ provides a long-overdue spotlight on these exceptional artists. When looking at our history from the perspective of the fairgrounds, a richer picture of American art emerges.”

Each gallery in the exhibition considers personal stories of craft found in different areas of the fairgrounds, from the art exhibits and heritage villages to the parades, dairy barns and rodeos. Ribbon-winning artworks and engaging craft demonstrations illuminate the lives of the artists—their families, memories, honors and struggles. It offers a perspective on the social power of fairgrounds across the United States and dispels stereotypes about rural communities. Many of the artworks on view directly connect the artists’ personal experiences with the experience of the fair. The exhibition also calls attention to people and communities whose experiences with fairs are entangled with histories of exclusion and displacement.  

The works in “State Fairs” are drawn from the museum’s holdings and loans from various artists and fairs, private and family collections and public museums and institutions.

“State Fairs: Growing American Craft” is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. 

RENWICK GALLERY

Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

americanart.si.edu

Rose Iron Works and Art Deco @ CMA - Cleveland Museum of Art - A Journey from Art Nouveau to Art Deco

Rose Iron Works and Art Deco 

Cleveland Museum of Art

July 6 - October 19, 2025

Muse with Violin Screen, 1930 

Rose Iron Works (America, Ohio, Cleveland, est. 1904) 

Designed by Paul Fehér (American, b. Hungary, 1898–1990)

Steel, brass, silver and gold plating, cotton velveteen, 

156.2 x 156.2 cm. 

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund, 2020.216. 

© Rose Iron Works Collections  

Martin Rose (American, 1870–1955)

Rose, c. 1904

Wrought iron; 35.6 x 14 x 40.6 cm.  

© Rose Iron Works Collections 

Rose Iron Works, the family-owned, Cleveland source for premiere quality decorative metalwork, is the subject of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s (CMA) newest exhibition, Rose Iron Works and Art Deco. An important part of Cleveland’s artistic heritage, Rose Iron Works has been operating continuously since its founding in 1904, creating a legacy of industry, craftwork, and artistic production. Rose Iron Works and Art Deco traces the company’s journey from Art Nouveau to Art Deco during its first 30 years.

In the early 1900s, Cleveland was one of the wealthiest cities in the United States and a center for metalworking, which made it an appealing place for Hungarian ornamental blacksmith Martin Rose, founder of Rose Iron Works, to start a business. It soon became one of the leading manufacturers of decorative metalwork in the United States, with decorative metalwork adorning some of the city’s most notable buildings.  

Trained in Budapest and Vienna in a tradition that drew inspiration from recreating historical styles, Rose was interested in artistic and technological innovations. Around 1900, he adopted the Art Nouveau aesthetic, which used sinuous lines and organic forms inspired by nature, and in the late 1920s, a “modern” style. 

In 1925, a groundbreaking international exhibition in Paris presented modern decorative arts—a style that later became known as Art Deco. Rose’s compatriot and a designer active in Paris, Paul Fehér, joined Rose Iron Works in Cleveland a few years later. Their artistic collaboration resulted in some of the best Art Deco ironwork in the country, including the celebrated Muse with Violin Screen (1930), now in the CMA’s collection.  

“Rose Iron Works is important locally, nationally and internationally,” said Ada de Wit, Ellen S. and Bruce V. Mavec Curator of Decorative Arts at the CMA. “This exhibition places Rose Iron Works in context with an elite network of blacksmiths and designers in Europe between the cities of Budapest, Hungary; Vienna, Austria; and Paris, France. It is apparent that Martin Rose had his finger on the pulse of European trends in the decorative arts and was able to translate them for a Cleveland audience.” 

In the Art Deco period, decorative metalwork connoted luxury through high-quality craftsmanship; modern, sophisticated design; and the use of expensive materials such as brass, chrome, and in some cases, silver and gold plating, as well as novel alloys like monel. Ornaments played an important role in architecture and were used on everything from public buildings and places of worship to banks and private homes, many of which can still be seen, for example, in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights mansions.  

The exhibition showcases some of Rose Iron Works’ most notable Art Deco creations, including the now iconic Muse with Violin screen (1930), and loans from Rose Iron Works, such as an ambitious 90-foot frieze of the history of metalworking and a door grille salvaged from Halle Brothers Co. (1927), a high-end department store chain in Cleveland. Another significant loan is an overdoor (c. 1885) from the Museum of Applied Arts in Budapest, made by Gyula Jungfer (Hungarian, 1841–1908), Rose’s teacher in Budapest and the most successful artist-blacksmith in Hungary. It represents the European tradition and training that shaped Rose’s career.  

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART

11150 East Boulevard, Cleveland, Ohio 44106

www.clevelandart.org

Celebrating Contemporary Craft - Arkansas Arts Center's Exhibition

Celebrating Contemporary Craft 

Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR

December 5, 2003 - February 22, 2004

CELEBRATING CONTEMPORARY CRAFT is an exhibition organized by the Arkansas Arts Center to recognize the contributions of Alan DuBois, curator of decorative arts, who will retire in June 2004. Alan DuBois has selected approximately 100 contemporary craft pieces from the Arkansas Arts Center Collection. Works were chosen for their high quality and importance to the collection. A broad range of media including glass, basketry, wood and ceramics is on view.

The Arkansas Arts Center began collecting contemporary craft in 1968 and now houses over 600 works. In 1989, Alan DuBois joined the Arkansas Arts Center and has been instrumental in achieving national recognition and in doubling the size of contemporary craft collection.

ALAN DUBOIS said, "We are beginning to see the fruits of the decision made by the Arkansas Arts Center Board of Trustees and Foundation Board to collect contemporary craft pieces. The works are shared in exhibitions around the country and the museum and its unique collections have a national reputation." 

Arkansas Arts Center 
www.arkarts.com