Label TextPalestinian-American artist Jordan Nassar explores the cultural traditions of Palestine,
reflecting poignantly on the meaning of home and the experience of displacement.
Known primarily for embroidered compositions that employ the Palestinian technique of
tatreez, or cross-stitch, he began to experiment in 2022 with the ancient practice of
mosaic, as seen in Bethlehem-In-The-Galilee. Comprised of hand-poured glass tesserae
made in Mexico and cut by hand in the artist’s studio in Brooklyn, Nassar’s mosaic can
be installed horizontally, vertically, or continuously across two perpendicular walls.
Bethlehem-In-The-Galilee takes its title from one of the two mosaics that inspired it: a fragment of a floor excavated from a 5th
-6
th
-century Byzantine church in Bethlehem in
the Galilee. This fragment is now installed in the arrivals corridor of the Ben Gurion
Airport in Tel Aviv. Working from a photograph snapped on his cell phone, Nassar
meticulously recreated the mosaic’s two surviving sections. The first is a long piece of
the floor’s outer edge, which consists of a braided geometric border that frames small
medallions containing images of local flora and fauna. The second is one half of an
arched-shaped comprised of a fan-like motif and a patterned band. Nassar’s recreation is
loving—he described the process of remaking the mosaic as “a tender gesture”—but it is
not exact. The artist took creative liberties throughout, changing colors and stylistic
details and filling in some of the original’s missing elements using another Byzantine
mosaic—the Shellal Mosaic—as inspiration. Whimsical and engaging, Nassar’s
Bethlehem-In-The-Galilee is a historical and cultural hybrid—a contemporary mosaic that
also reflects obliquely on the ways history and archaeology serve social and political
ends.
DimensionsOverall: 36 x 240 in. (91.4 x 609.6 cm)
Panel (each): 36 x 48 in., 20 lb. (91.4 x 121.9 cm)
Panel (each): 36 x 48 in., 20 lb. (91.4 x 121.9 cm)
Accession Number 2025.42.a-.e
Classificationsceramic
ProvenanceArtist (James Cohan Gallery); Des Moines Art Center [purchased from previous, 2025]
