New York-born Jordan Nassar has Palestinian family roots. His show’s title “I Cut the Sky in Two” is from a poem by Etel Adnan, “the distinguished Lebanese-American painter and poet, and a touchstone for Mr. Nassar.”
He is best known for his embroidery work, some of it in collaboration with female Palestinian artisans.
… [Nassar] employs tatreez, Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery, to generate fields of ornate geometric patterns and interrupt them with insets of evocative, abstract landscapes — hills and valleys, the sun and sky..
This exhibition adds a new form: sculptures of glass beads, handmade in a style practiced in Hebron in the West Bank and mounted on undulating steel lattices, that depict landscapes in the same vein as the embroideries.
(“4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now,” NYTimes, 11-11-20)
(c) 2020 JMN
EthicalDative 
‘Explicit and Mysterious’
I’m a child of ranchers. Because of how misshapen and reactionary mythic cowboy culture is in America, I’m a fool for painting that introduces what Roberta Smith terms the “subversive theme of the gay black cowboy.”
And as usual, Ms. Smith illumines her subject (for me) with her incisive descriptions of technique.
All motifs benefit from ingenious combinations of strident drawing and suave stained color; they are often simultaneously transparent and opaque, explicit and mysterious.
(“4 Art Gallery Shows to See Right Now,” NYTimes, 11-11-20)
(c) 2020 JMN