IN THE PROJECT SPACE
PROJECTS OF ART AND ETHNOGRAPHY
LYDIA NAKASHIMA DEGARROD AND SUSAN OSSMAN
November 6–December 7, 2025
This exhibition brings together works of Lydia Nakashima Degarrod and Susan Ossman, two artist-anthropologists whose practices dissolve and play on boundaries between scholarship and art. Moving fluidly between ethnographic research and visual expression, their projects invite viewers to reflect on migration, memory, identity, and the ways knowledge takes shape across bodies, materials, and stories.
The exhibition unfolds in six sections, each anchored by a distinct project. Nakashima Degarrod’s Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls traces the migration of Japanese communities to Latin America through handmade paper, printing, and embroidery, while her Atlas of Dreams transforms interviews and dérive into paintings that “unveil the invisible.” In Asian Eyes, she engages questions of ethnicity and embodiment through intimate portraits of women’s eyes and recorded voices.
Ossman presents large paintings of laundry on the line show how ethnography inflected her palette and style and instigated a widening circle of artistic collaboration around the ecological, gender and social aspects of washing clothes. in contrast, Sources, a delicate painting on organza, was composed in the context of a longstanding project, a roving collective called The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop that explores experiences of migration through successive site-specific events. Bibliography and Spazieren Gehen resulted from making the materials and gestures of scholarship the subject of ethnographic study.
Together, these works and the projects they represent open a space where imagination, intellect, and emotion intersect. Visitors encounter not only completed artworks but also traces of their making—interviews, documentation, and collaborative processes—illuminating possibilities for associating ethnographic and artistic practices.
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 6, 5:30 PM
Artist Biographies
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod is a visual artist, anthropologist, and curator. She creates multimedia works that blur the line between art and ethnography addressing emotional dreams, race, and migration. She has published widely on anthropology and art, been a Senior Fellow at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and grantee of the NEH, Fulbright-Hayes and the Tinker Foundation and won awards from the Culture Ministry of Chile, the Wing Luke Museum, and the International Contemporary Crafts. She has exhibited widely in the US and Latin America and curated numerous, most recently at the Monterey Museum of Art. She is an advisor to the Asian American Women Artists Association and a professor at the California College for the Arts.
Susan Ossman is an artist and anthropologist known for innovative research design across sites and disciplines. Her projects on media, globalization, migration and the environment associate art and scholarship, individual and collaborative moments to generate a wide variety of outcomes. A Guggenheim fellow and grantee of the NEA, Fulbright, CNRS (France) and the British Academy, Ossman is the author of dozens of articles and several books, most recently Shifting Worlds, Shaping Fieldwork: A Memoir of Anthropology and Art (Routledge 2021). Her paintings and installations, performances and films have been exhibited, performed and projected in North America, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. She is NYUAD Professor of Movements, Spaces and Cultural Practices.