Artist Ron Norsworthy’s lucid dreaming

Friday, Nov. 14, my highlight of Autumn in New York, was a visit to the opening reception for artist Ron Norsworthy’s new art show, his second solo exhibition at the Edwynn Houk Gallery (693 Fifth Avenue, 6th floor, 212-750-7070; on view through Dec. 23). It features his disarming American Dream series of collaged mixed media reliefs.

In the 18th century, his pictures might have been described as “conversation pieces.” Their creator characterizes them as “Art imitating life imitating art — a continuous feedback loop…” Norsworthy says, “My process, especially when sketching compositions, feels almost like lucid dreaming. I let the objects, figures, and spaces organize themselves within the frame…”

As nostalgic and aspirational as any illustration from Martha Stewart’s M Magazine, American Dream’s seemingly static tableau in domestic interiors presents Black middle-class life as an African American idyll. These are scenes, Norsworthy maintains, hovering between the achieved and the desired.

On entering, the first two works encountered in the sequence on view are “Coming and Going” and “Dolton,” 1965. Each narrative is set in the suburbs, north and south of Chicago. The first, says the artist, “Incorporates the house from the film ‘Ordinary People;’ the latter imagines the future Pope Leo XIV as a ten-year-old in his kitchen.”

A surprise for Norsworthy, indicative of the synchronous “loop” of life he refers to, recently occurred when the first American pontiff, listing his four favorite films, named “Ordinary People” among them.

The 1980 drama, the first movie directed by Robert Redford, examines a wealthy family in crisis. After one son dies in an accident, the other (Timothy Hutton) attempts suicide. His mother (Mary Tyler Moore), obsessed with maintaining a respectable front, struggles to avoid shame and scandal. Instead, she assures disaster.

As depicted by Norsworthy, the members of this highly privileged but doomed family are African American.

Michael Henry Adam photos

Existing in a realm betwixt the metaphoric and the material, Norsworthy’s architecture and decor seem resoundingly decorous, dignified, and enduring. Supposedly mere backgrounds, they play a part as important as any of the figures in their midst. Exemplary of the double consciousness W.E.B. Du Bois described, they make the tension between Black ambition, attainment, and opposition palpable.

To refute the resurgent racist libel of unqualified Blacks, Norsworthy, a scholar, enlists every fragment of art, film, and design history and any personal memory at his disposal. He depicts a flawed and still unequal triumph, one requiring that his subjects work twice as hard as all other contenders. “Good Times Black Jesus,” even lilies from his garden, are just some of the components sampled from a rich visual lexicon. Most importantly, he draws from our shared heritage of America’s most arresting imagery. Norsworthy explains that he has approached photography as both a physical and cultural language, “One that has long shaped how America imagines itself.”

Frequently forgotten, increasingly suppressed, there have been innumerable depictions of people of color in the past. But Norsworthy not only brings the Black presence to the foreground: his work also suggests that, but for opportunity, and even without it, one might substitute Blacks in the most prominent positions, in all the most important and compelling portrayals of America’s story.

Much as with post-impressionist pointillist paintings by Seurat from the 1880s and ‘90s, a superficial survey of the pictures on display, to say nothing of much of the entirety of Norsworthy’s oeuvre, very likely also appears to be a pretty, but incomprehensible blur. Au contraire! Backing up to get a better perspective, inspection, best obtained with study and distance, shows each carefully considered object and every element differently. Be it an LP from Diana Ross’ breakthrough film “Mahogany,” or cute stylized cumulus clouds, derived from a Grant Wood landscape, packed with meaning, every aspect of Norsworthy’s output is referential and significant.

What’s the point? It is simplicity itself: From the carefully cultivated and highly informed vantage point of Ron Norsworthy, everything we see and know is connected to everything else. Just as powerfully as Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Kara Walker, and others, but by different means, his art illustrates just how much anything Queer and everything Black, unavoidably, is American too.

Like it or not, when it comes to discerning our country and appreciating what most makes it great, Norsworthy shows that diversity, equity, and inclusion are not optional, but imperative.

For more info, visit ronnorsworthy.com and houkgallery.com