Until 7 December 2025, the Project Space in NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery is hosting the Projects of Art Ethnography exhibition. It brings together the parallel but distinct practices of two artist-anthropologists: Lydia Nakashima Degarrod and Susan Ossman. Their work moves fluidly between research and visual expression, inviting us to reflect on migration, memory, identity, and how knowledge materialises across bodies, materials, and stories.
The show comprises six sections, each anchored by a distinct project. For Degarrod, one of the key works is Scattered Seeds of the Cotton Bolls (2021), which traces the migration of her Japanese family to Latin America through handmade paper, printing, and embroidery. Another project, Atlas of Dreams, transforms interviews and dérive into paintings that seek to “unveil the invisible”. A third, Asian Eyes, engages with questions of ethnicity and embodiment through intimate portraits of women’s eyes and recorded voices.
For Ossman, the exhibition presents large-scale paintings of laundry on the line. They show how her ethnographic work has shaped her palette and style, creating collaborative networks around ecological, gender, and social aspects of washing clothes. In contrast, her work Sources, a painting on organza, emerges from her collective project, the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop, which examines the experience of migration through site-specific events and collaborative processes. Additional artworks, Bibliography and Spazieren Gehen, bring to the fore the materials and gestures of scholarship themselves as subjects of ethnographic inquiry.
Together, the exhibited art pieces create a space where imagination, intellect, and emotion intersect. Visitors do not simply encounter finished artworks, but also glimpses of the process of research, collaboration, and making. Interviews, documentation, and collaborative processes are embedded in the display, inviting one to reconsider how art and ethnography might overlap in method and meaning.
About the artists
Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, PhD, is an acclaimed visual artist, anthropologist, and curator whose multimedia works blur the line between art and ethnography. Her work investigates the terrain of dreams, race, migration and diasporic memory, giving form to personal and collective experiences of displacement.
Degarrod’s career is marked by numerous distinctions, which include a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Grant, a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant, a Senior Fellowship at Harvard University, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Virginia. She has exhibited widely in the USA and abroad, receiving awards from the Wing Luke Memorial Museum of Art, Saint John’s University, and the Ministry of Culture of Chile. Recently, she was honoured with a Fellowship at the Women’s International Study Center in Santa Fe (New Mexico).
Susan Ossman, PhD, is an artist, anthropologist, writer, and historian whose research-led projects span multiple sites and disciplines. She is Professor of Movements, Spaces and Cultural Practices at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she also serves as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies. Ossman’s work engages themes of media, globalisation, migration, environment and the convergence of artistic and scholarly inquiry. As an artist, she has exhibited and performed in galleries, museums and public contexts throughout the United States, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
To get more information about Projects of Art Ethnography, please visit the official web page of the exhibition.
In addition, you might be interested in visiting The Imaginary Museum.
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