THE
MUSEUM
OF
IDEAS
In the Mind of Artist
Ron Norsworthy
December 2024 | in art
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THE MUSEUM OF IDEAS | In the Mind Series
Cover Artwork, Narcissus and Echo, 2024. Mixed media collage in relief on wood panel. Courtesy of artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery.
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Part I: The Truth Mirror
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Who's lucky enough to make their ideas into commodified things and who isn't? How is that mediated? And whose things are held in higher esteem and why? These are interesting questions to me.
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-Ron Norsworthy
Is Ron Norsworthy's work photography? Yes. Is it a sculpture? Yes, it's dimensional. Is it a painting? Yes, he describes his work as paintings. The dimensions of his work invite touch, as they are tactile in appearance. Even so, they're not really meant to be touched with our human hands, at least.
The work seems meant to be felt with something else—our human heart.
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​He uses technology to create his work, but the three dimensional nature of his renderings invites us out of our virtual and digital spaces into a human space—where we can see and feel things. The work's dimensions and layers are an invitation to experience it in person. His work, then, is an impetus for us to set aside our screens for a moment and to step back into three dimensions with each other.
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​To face each other. ​
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​His work in the decorative arts and his knowledge of Western Renaissance art live in his creations, too, so his paintings seem sort of familiar, like an old photograph of somewhere we've been. A suburban backyard, an aunt’s living room, a girl’s bedroom. The images provoke something in the recesses of our memory—an alleyway, a tabletop—isn't that chair familiar? We've felt the soft-padded nature of the carpet we see in Narcissus and Echo under our feet.
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The images are nostalgic—comfortable—uncomfortable, as even though they are familiar, there is something about the invisible parts of our lives that live in his work. And the narratives don't quite add up with our reality. Even the construction of the work doesn't fully add up.​​ Can a painting be made of anything but paint, for example?
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​Let’s back up.
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​Who is Ron Norsworthy? And how did the layer of my life connect with Ron’s life?
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​Chances are you've encountered his work. He's been profiled in the New York Times and is credited with designing iconic music videos. His collaboration DARNstudio with husband and artist David Anthone explores "objects, ideas and structures through a process they refer to as 're:meaning.'" The list of Ron's creative pursuits as a filmmaker, designer, and artist is long and it's ongoing. He is a rather perfect candidate for a The Museum of Ideas® In the Mind exploration, as he is not short on ideas or thoughts about them.
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In fact, in spite of the three-dimensional nature of Ron's work, we’ve only met in two dimensions. Unless you count the dimensions of a dream as another dimension entirely.
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The way the conversation between Ron Norsworthy and me started was in a dream. In my dream, we had scheduled a conversation after being introduced, and when I arrived, there was a proxy in Ron Norsworthy’s place. That was the dream. Outside of the dreamworld, our first two meetings didn’t work. There was a conflict with our already scheduled date and time and then a blip in scheduling, which prevented us twice from conversing.
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Our first conversation happened when, rather than use all the online scheduling mechanisms—Calendly, Outlook, Gmail, WhatsApp, we've all been calendared—he simply sent me his telephone number so that we could just talk. A rare kindness to offer a voice to begin with. When we connected, we ended up in conversation for about two hours, from his studio in New York to my remote office space in the Midwest.
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Unscheduled time is also a precious rarity today, isn’t it?
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Voice to voice.
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That was the beginning.
“How do ideas come to be, right? That's something that we are both interested in. Maybe from a different point of view. An idea can take a physical form, but it can also exist in other forms and I don't know that it's necessary to describe what the form is for things to exist inside of it,” Ron said at one point.
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Ron showed up for the conversation just after travels and even as he was busy preparing for his current solo show, I, Narcissus, at Edwynn Houk Gallery. He showed up because, as he said, “The appreciation for the beauty and mystery of ideas and their forms pre-existing to fruition is something that we each care about.”
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The time he dedicated to our conversation—two conversations—actually, demonstrated his commitment to thought and the exploration of ideas for their own sake.
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What form might the ideas we generated in our conversation take?
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Is it necessary for an idea to take any shape?
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That question is where we ended the conversation.
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Ron’s demeanor is kind and thoughtful, and balanced with compassionate intensity– and in our closing conversation, he reminded me what a privilege it is to spend time with another person. That ending left me in a sort of reflective reverie, which is perhaps where an In The Mind conversation should lead. Ending always with a question. What form should it take? Should it take any form at all? The conversation itself had some shapes of a gift. A few hours in thought. A few hours of conversation.
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Was that enough? Does the world need anything more than that?
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If Ron made a difference in my life, asking me questions that will affect me and how I interact with the world as I move forward, is that difference enough?
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As Lewis Hyde teaches us, the gift of a gift is that it keeps moving. So it seems right that I’ll keep the gift of a conversation with Ron Norsworthy moving so that you might benefit too. (Perhaps you'll pass on what you learn).
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But the conversation served not only as a gift but also as a mirror. I’m still reflecting off of it.
Ron’s work is about mirrors. Mirrors show up in symbols. Mirrors as mirrors. Mirrors as screens. Screens as mirrors. Portraits as mirrors. Rooms as mirrors. Each other as mirrors.
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His paintings have mirrors in them.
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And a conversation with him is a mirror.
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Maybe his work is all a mirror.
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His work is about what we might see or find in ourselves. Not with judgment, but with awareness and responsibility. For example, how might we correct the narratives of ourselves (when they need correction) and still love ourselves? What if we (courageously) stand in front of a truth mirror? What if we see ourselves as the mirror sees us? As others see us? What might we then also see in others?
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Or do we even see others? Are we always somehow looking at ourselves?
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Are we gazing at ourselves so much that we might not experience the truth (of us) as others do?
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​Are we gazing at ourselves so much that we might not experience the truth of our community?
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And what about Narcissus?
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​In our conversation, (see below) Ron and I speak about the community in which he lives today where acclaimed writer Ralph and his wife Fanny Ellison tried to purchase a house in the early sixties. He researched their story and learned that in 2016 he was the third Black person to own a home in this community noting that in nearly sixty years little change had occurred. In his piece Poolside (They Can't Bother Us Today), he visits the idea of what could happen without race-related bias and discrimination.
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We see an alternate narrative of our past. We see a possible narrative for our future.
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​​A truth mirror, by the way, is a non-reversing mirror or flip mirror. It shows the subject as it would be seen from the mirror, rather than reversing the image. The concept of a truth mirror is based on two mirrors placed at right angles to each other, with the second mirror undoing the reversal caused by the first. The mirrors are constructed so that the right angle is so precise that it's not visible. Some say that when you make eye contact with yourself in a truth mirror, your expression reads correctly, and your response can be like how others respond to you.​
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​A conversation with Ron invites a truth mirror to emerge. What could be emerges as a hopeful and persistent (re)imagination. This is a way to begin and begin again.
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​I welcome you to Part II, a brief reflection on the power of corrective lenses. If you wish to dive right into our to our published conversation about ideas and Ron's working philosophy, scan to Part III.
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Fortunately, there was never a proxy in Ron Norsworthy’s place.
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​​-Shannon Mullen O'Keefe
"Narcissus Dearest", Mixed Media, collage relief, Wood on panel 2024. Courtesy of Ron Norsworthy
Part II: A Reflection on Corrective Lenses and Imagination
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Thought experiments can help us break away from our fixed beliefs. They can help us elevate and see the surrounding structures through a new lens. Such experiments can be a lens that distorts or reframes things.
New ideas can be a corrective lens for us when we need to be corrected.
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Sometimes the status quo needs to go. "Do the best until you know better, and then when you know better, do better," was Maya Angelou's sage advice. She gives us permission to continue to look and when we realize something isn't right--to do better.
When thinkers bring new ideas–they are like an Opthamologist——offering us a way—a tool— to refract and shape what we see so that we can change our behavior when needed. This could be, as in my conversation with Ron, a shift from looking at things through a patriarchal lens to looking at things from a matriarchal perspective as one example. This came up in our first—not recorded conversation. Later, we talked about the power of a lens as it relates to shaping our future. "I would love to see a lens that is distorted towards... that was kind of transformative... What if the lens of victimization was a lens that could allow us to still see the world as a positive place? Right. So how could a lens be corrective? Could it be medicinal? Be palliative? That's interesting," Ron said.
This nod toward a healing lens is also present in Toni Morrison's oft-quoted remark: "This is precisely the time when artists go to work. Here is no time for despair. No place for self pity. No need for silence. No room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language, that is how civilizations heal."
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​Ron has gone to work, setting aside self-pity, (I, Narcissus is about beauty and self-love, maybe the opposite of self-pity) and rather embracing a refracted view of the world that he invites us also to see. This is how art does its work—as a refractive lens—as a mirror—as a thought experiment that invites us to heal.
So, what do Norsworthy's paintings refract or reflect of us?
The chair in the room. The rug that is on the floor. The lamp near the door?
Somewhere in our conversation, we even discussed how what we wear says so much about us. Why do we choose the clothes we are wearing? Is everything we (all of us) wearing everyday drag? Are we each a performance artist?
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Is our life a performance? Who is our audience? Who is it we dress for?
Never mind our naked bodies, would anyone recognize our naked–internal self? Is our face a mask? Is what we say out loud masking how we really feel?
Is mascara just part of the ruse? Lip gloss? Foundation.
Our tennis shoes.
Why do we like that lamp or sofa? Why do we like what we do? Are our things a portrait of us? ​
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Why do we live where we live? Were we allowed to choose?
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How do the objects we collect represent us as objects ourselves?
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In Ron’s work, he has a vase, a vessel that represents him as an object. A vessel is a hollow object, decorative on the outside, but the inside is empty. Or is it? What are we each filled with? Are we more than what we paint on the outside? Is Vanitas #1–a vessel an image—about Ron's aunt or our friend?
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In Vanitas #1 we also see a fish in water. A fish being observed by us. Its also looking at us, of course.
There is no saying if that fish in water has any relevance to ​David Foster Wallace's graduation speech at Kenyon college. Perhaps this is the mirror in Ron's work doing its work on me, but I called Wallace to mind. In that speech he said: 'There are these two young fish swimming along and they meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says 'Morning... How’s the water?'And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?'"
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What the hell is water indeed?
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Wallace speech or no Wallace speech,​ Norsworthy's work is an invitation to wonder about the water all around us. What is the water around us?
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Have we paid attention to how it is shaping our lives? To how it might shape the lives of others?
​"Imagination takes work. It is a muscle, like the other muscles we have. We have to use it.
Art is an invitation to work for it. It takes being “intentionally random sometimes,” Ron said.
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If indeed we are like that fish — we might wonder what the water is.
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We might also pause to wonder what might be on the other side.
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There is little that is random about Ron's work. There is deep and probing intentionality that invites us to leave, reflecting on ourselves and the invisible structures all around us.
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Imagination takes work. It is the first step toward creating a refractive (corrective) lens. Ron invites us to do the work.
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See below for Part III. The Conversation.
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Our recorded conversation happened over Zoom on August 27, 2024. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
"Vanitas #1 (Got to Be Real), 2024 Narcissus Dearest", Mixed Media, collage relief, Wood on panel 2024. Courtesy of Ron Norsworthy
Part III. Our Conversation
How much time are you thinking about your work? I'm thinking about it right now. I think all the time about my work. Because if I'm not thinking about something that is in the process of being made, I'm thinking about something that I want to make and how I might make it. And my work literally expands into not just physical work, as it might be understood in the art market as, like, an object, but it's also like the formation of concepts and ideas—that is, work—how to bring this work into three dimensions, if that's where it's going to go. Ultimately, that invisible work is a part of the finished work.
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​So where is it before it's in three dimensions? I think that for me it's in here... it's in my soul, right? And it's in my muscle memory. It's in my fingertips. So I think it's a thought, a memory and/or a feeling. Really all of this exists in a kind of realm. But I don't think it's a realm that we identify as a place. You can go to a place that can be inhabited, right? But I mean something else. I see more of a point where your heart and your mind and your stimuli connect wherever that is. But that's not a place, is it? Or is it a place? It's not physical, I don't think, and that's something I never really thought about–so I’m kind of formulating... I'm kind of like cooking, as I think, but right now I'm making some—we're making something and it's a thought. That's what's being made, and that thought is kind of changing its shape and form. But maybe not in the way we think of shape and form.
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Where do ideas come from….or where do your ideas come from? I think they come from a way of processing an experience. It could be an experience in the past. It could be an experience in the future. It could be an imagined experience. But I think it's a way of interpreting something that I'm feeling or experiencing. As an artist, I have a facility for that. I think we all, as human beings, have a facility in the being and doing what we call an art. And I think, like all our perceptions and abilities, they are muscles. If you use a muscle, the better, more reliably, it performs. If it's not used, then it's not, and so that ability or facility, the process of being able to do it easily or more easily, is from practice and from giving yourself permission to do it in the first place. So when I think of an idea, what is an idea? I'm thinking it's a thought like... I am hungry; I am excited, I'm bored, I'm sleepy. I'm thinking a lot of things. Ideas sort of coexist with other ideas, and then they have a party, right? They combine and do things together. That is where art starts to become interesting, at least for me, because the ideas as they jumble up and concepts,theories, themes are found. Discovered. Some of them are new and some are retrieved. I mean, they happened like in the moment, and they are a discovered memory or idea and then all of a sudden, in its own sort of form in the present. So it's kind of like when we think ideas combine to form these complex things. Sort of like an organism forming out of atoms.
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Then, in thinking about the concept of idea as an atom or an organism, when you have this thing, like, swimming around in your brain, or when these cells are combining in thought form... When do you actually start to make it? Or what makes it worth actually putting it into a physical form so that it becomes like an object that can be shared with someone else? There may be some assumptions one makes when asking that. Some things aren't best realized in a form. Some things aren't ready to be realized in a form. So one may be assuming that a “finished” idea wants to take the shape of a form. How do ideas form into a form? Are there compelling forces, say ambition, desire or ego, that push these thought forms into a physical reality? In my practice there are people that I employ that help me make what I'm making. So at that point, the ideas are in service of art production. That is the industry of art. And I know I'm completely taking the romance out of many people's idea of what art is when I say this but you know, I think, that there are motivating factors that contribute to an idea becoming a form that serve capitalistic enterprises. To contemplate art outside of its physical or economical use is not a luxury that I have been able, or would even want, to enjoy. I understand that in addition to whatever I may see it as or want it to be, my work leaves my studio essentially as a commodity. If we’re being honest with ourselves, artists must think of art as being a sustainable endeavor or vocation. We also have to think about how our ideas can align with our ability to sustain our careers and do what we want to do? I feel very lucky that I work in an industry where I can transform my ideas into physical things and that those things can find an audience within that market that supports my production.​
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I'm interested. Is there a difference, then, in what a designer is—and an artist? I think there's a huge difference. Which difference would you like to make?
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​I'm just curious, because thinking back a few moments ago about this idea of capitalism, or there being a purpose for what is produced? Is there, then, a world in which art is produced not for a purpose or not for an end, and would it look different, or would it be different? No. I was just talking about my reality, the specific context of my idea-making. It would be false if I were to tell you that my ideas just get to live in an idea land; anyway that feels frivolous. And I’m not especially interested in frivolity. I am serious about what I want to put in this world.
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Yeah.
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So, no, I don't think that the mechanics of the economy in which I work and hopefully thrive is something that deters me from having ideas. As a matter of fact, I like real-world parameters and how they provide the necessary counterforces that compel art to be more. Also, remember, we spoke about power versus influence in a previous conversation. I'm much more interested in my work shaping others ideas of what art can be… of how we might make, how we might combine materials. New things. And hopefully loosen up some of these structures. In our hierarchy of materials, where we might say, for example, that oil paint is a more noble medium than a child’s crayon. And these material hierarchies also form barriers. The cost of materials impacts who may have access to them. And so I just said when we were speaking about how an idea can become a thing if it wants to become a thing, one has to necessarily also consider the context in which that idea is even formed and maybe, maybe while we're thinking about it who gets to have ideas? Who's lucky enough to make their ideas into commodified things and who isn't? How is that mediated? And whose things are held in higher esteem and why? These are interesting questions to me.
One of your pieces, and this caught my attention, and I'm trying at the moment to think of the name...is a piece in which you recreated the past from the vantage point of the future. You changed what the past is, so you reimagined it differently than it was... Is the piece coming to mind for you? That was about a period in history when a famous black writer couldn't buy a house and…
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This is it! This is exactly the piece. Yes. It’s actually one of four works from a series that contemplates an alternate narrative. This couple was denied the opportunity to own a house because of they were Black. Their story intersects with my personal story because I now live in that town. I found out about their story on the day we closed on our home, in 2016. I was just casually leafing through a book about the history of the town and there was this amazing bit of history. Like it had been waiting for me to see it. I have later come to learn that there have been less than a handful of Black homeowners in this town. It boggles the mind, but then again not, that more than half a century passes and little has changed. So I had an idea: I need to right the wrong. And I need to create an artifact of what should’ve happened. I'm not trying to erase history. I am adding the potential of what could happen without race-related bias and discrimination to an existing history.
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​​​​I think that's what was so intriguing to me when I looked at that, because this project I have—The Museum of Ideas; is about... “Let's imagine what's possible!” But that was an imagination of what's possible... looking backward.​ Looking backward, right.
Which was so... I was really, I think, just intrigued by that, and what you're saying, not in a way to erase, but to help imagine something that didn't somehow happen in the past, but could have been right. It's like non-linear time...in some way. It's like another time (that didn’t exist, but could have if we had been willing to look at things differently).​ Also, we can think about what I created as being a kind of a corrective narrative. And maybe that is because time goes beyond us and so saying that the point was for me to create an artifact that would... that would be an artifact in the future where at some point we could look back at my intervention and what actually happened, and then process those two things together... right? And my personal story. If you want to go a layer or two even deeper because it is in the White popular imagination, there’s this notion of black familial life as being of broken families, of more urban, less rural settings. Also the notion of leisure activities like swimming, and whose forced free labor funded and enabled the privilege of leisure time. All of these things come together in the work, Poolside. The four works that I have in the series, the figures of Ralph and Fanny Ellison are relaxing. They are most definitely not working. They are in repose.
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​I may have mentioned the other day, when we talked briefly about that conversation I had about the alien that was with a team of philosophers. They were talking about social constructs, and what would happen if an alien visited us who had never been or had an experience with a social group. And we had to explain to them [the alien] what a social construct was, and what the purpose for it was. And I'm thinking of the same situation in which this alien arrives and views your painting and what that would mean to this alien who's never known anything about the way we’ve operated, and how they might view what our lives were like. Right, and when I think about what an alien is or an alternate life form..we already have artificial intelligence (AI). We have AI that's with us right now. That [we have little] or no thoughts or judgments about these constructs that we form for ourselves. But something that AI has that I think aliens would also have is a plethora of data. For all sorts of reasons I could posit that my work might not jibe with the alien data while also becoming part of their data. It’s a bit delicious to think of my work as being errant data.
[See: Large Language Models are Biased. Can Logic Help Save Them? Bias in LLMs. Northworthy’s painting is an interesting analogy for how a corrected data set might read for a LLM.]
"Pink soap," 2024. Courtesy of Laurie Victor Kay
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Black is Beautiful, allegory No. 6, collage relief, Wood on panel 2021. Courtesy of Ron Norsworthy
I'm calling to mind one of your images with two young girls playing with dolls and a doll house—I'm thinking about that image. All my work is always about its physical form but also its themes and object matter. I'm always talking about structure–my works are constructions. They're layers and in those layers are meaning, but also a framework and it's an analog to how we humans construct hierarchies and systems in which we operate. So I'm all about providing unprocessed access points in my work. So I hope the work meets the viewer where they are. The work is transparent in the sense that it is full of historic references; it is full of cultural references. You may pick up on them. You may not. They're coded for certain community members to pick up on, and others to miss. But they are there.They are honest in their depiction of the things. So I'm sort of creating a little quiz for the viewers: What are you seeing? I'm learning, through the work, about who you are.
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Yeah [laughs.]
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You're laughing. That's funny.
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I'm curious….have you ever created an actual pop quiz for your viewers? For your work? It’s so interesting to me to think about that idea of the layers within that viewers may or may not pick up on and how you think about a viewer, like me and what I see and if you are ever able to know. I have a work that was in a group exhibition, Harlemworld, at the Studio Museum. The work, a site-specific installation, was a sales office for an imagined 40-story luxury apartment building, Reparation Tower, in the shape of an upturned fist. The ubiquitous symbol of the Black Power Movement. It was a bit of Afrofuturism before it’s time, so to speak [laughs]. Inside the sales office there was a questionnaire that visitors could fill out. I should back up and say that the sales office had segregated entrances: a white entrance, and a colored entrance. You could choose whichever one you wanted. If you chose the colored entrance you entered a plexiglass partition, so you couldn't actually go into the sales office. You just got to see—but you couldn't participate. ​And then the white entrance allowed you into the actual office with very seductive high-end marketing.and that’s where the quiz, in this case the Prospective Homeowners Questionnaire, was next to a collection basket and a shredder. You could fill out the questionnaire and submit it for evaluation—or you could fill out the questionnaire and shred it. I have a sampling of the completed and shredded questionnaires.
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​The quiz was invasive and obnoxious by design. For instance, it asked prospective homeowners how many Black people they knew; how many Black people they were friends with; how many Black people they had had sex with. In another section it asked, if they were rich, poor, or fronting? Did they misrepresent their economic status? ​It also asked, Are you in favor of reparations for formerly enslaved people? It asked if you were down? Are you down? Yes or No?
It was just a battery of rude, for some, questions, and I think many Black people felt very comfortable answering them. I think some White people did not feel very comfortable answering, The questionnaire was designed to invert the power dynamics inherent in quizzing and being quizzed. In another way one can think about the mechanics involved in othering.
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​And that was really interesting because you got answers. I think because the questionnaire was anonymous people may have felt more comfortable answering despite the perhaps invasive questions. And I hoped that the people that were experiencing the installation understood the intersection of class and race that my project was teasing out.
Artwork courtesy of the artist. Reparation Tower, Harlem, Exterior View from the corner of 126th street and Lenox Avenue, 2004.
But it also makes me think of that concept that you shared with me the other day about the Truth Mirror. Yeah.
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Like, how much do we really see about ourselves? And we look in a mirror, maybe every day, and we think we see... we think we see ourselves, but we don't. I don't see myself as you see me. No, I see myself just as I see myself. Which is interesting. It is why in my works one will typically find representations of mirrors. My collages in relief are also, in addition to referencing other genres and typologies, allegorical. In my practice I try to keep going back to an ethos of curiosity. I have to be pursuing my curiosity in order for an idea to become a thing. If I'm not curious or interested about what I'm making the themes that the work engages.I need to be curious about it. And so I am curious about how a mirror functions. What a mirror can be. Society is a mirror. We spoke in our last conversation about the energy that you put out into the world. If you are negative the world may be reflected back negatively. If you have been victimized how can you not see the world through the lens of your victimization?
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​Just as you said that I started to imagine what a lens of victimization would actually look and feel like. I think we can all access that, can't we? I think if we have been harmed. We have been victims of something...
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​Somehow, when you said that, though, I saw it as a structure—I have never thought of it in that way, but when you said it, I actually called to mind, like, what is a physical thing that represents the lens of victimization? The culture. The important thing is to understand that lenses distort. A lens that has not distorted something? I would love to see a lens that is distorted towards... that was kind of transformative... What if the lens of victimization was a lens that could allow us to still see the world as a positive place? Right. So how could a lens be corrective? Could it be medicinal? Be palliative? That's interesting.
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​Like an Ophthalmologist you're making me think... How can a lens help as opposed to amplify? Yes. Eyeglasses. Right?
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​Yeah. For our vision to clarify and to make clearer things that are fuzzy, this is the way I see my art. This is the way I live my life, I see it as being this constant mixture of thoughts, ideas, and concepts, and it's my job as an artist–it is my job to respond and on many levels, to make those connections. To share what I have discovered. Now, it doesn't have to be an answer. It has to be a way of thinking that someone else maybe hasn’t thought about in that way, or that someone has thought about, but hasn't pursued the idea to a form. It does take time. It does take other resources in addition to time to be able to do that. I think most people are consumed with another level, a more primary level of survival. And then those that do have the luxury perhaps haven't, for whatever reason, flexed those muscles. To make things because they've been conditioned by a system to understand that they can't create things because they're a banker, or because they're a nurse, or because they're a school teacher, or whatever their occupation is, and that's why artists get to have—I don't know if we talked about this, or if I spoke about this with somebody else. But why? Why? Do people that aren't artists look at artists and say things like, “That's so much fun–you get to have fun.” It's my job. So I don't know how to take that quite, but again, what's my lens? So I'm going to use the lens that says no harm; if I use my victim lens, I’m incredibly offended. But I can't. I'll need to use a different lens. ​It's a matter of choice.
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​So you have so much work, and I know we've used up the hour. We didn't talk about matchbooks in quilts or talk about the rooms and feeling inhabited. I mean, you have so much going on, I'm just amazed at the amount in some ways.​ I think my parents, like many parents, were very skeptical of me pursuing a career as an artist. My parents really discouraged it, actually. Ironically, though, I was very much encouraged to pursue art as a hobby by way of private lessons and instruction from an early age. My parents understood the world in a way that I didn't and couldn’t, and they were like, “You can't earn a living, and we can't support you doing this.” And that was my reality. So I had to find another way, and in finding another way, here I am. I have come to art through different professions, and been able to develop all these different skill sets that I combine with this insatiable curiosity that I’ve always had. I've found my way to art indirectly and I bring all the experiences that have brought me to here. I think art school is great. And if you had asked me then, I would have really loved having parents that offered, "Sure, go to art school, get your MFA...We'll pay for it.” I most definitely would not have said no! But I also would have been a different artist than I am now. I got to chart my own path and I get to do it my way.
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Ron’s solo show at Edwyn Houk Gallery is about Narcissus, the contemplation of the myth of Echo and Narcissus. It is intended to be an interrogation of beauty and self-love.
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Visit Edwynn Houk Gallery November 14 - December 21. If you're lucky enough you'll see the work in three-dimensions.
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​This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
Photo: Courtesy of Ron Norsworthy
About Ron Norsworthy
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Ron is an interdisciplinary artist whose broad practice engages the fields of design, art, filmmaking and architecture. His work employs notions of spaces and decoration of space as narratives about his lived experience as a queer person of the global majority as well as that of his community/communities. A foundational belief that the rooms, spaces and environments that we inhabit and interact with speak volumes about not only who we are and our identities, but also our dreams, aspirations and our struggles, informs his work. Through the creation of collaged reliefs, decorative objects, textiles and installations, his work carries the viewer with him through the non-linear, layered story of his life: where he’s been, where he is, and where he’s going or might imagine going.
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He's long tapped into the power of space-making as an effective means to share narratives. As production designer for iconic music videos and televised events, he created worlds that helped visualize the soundtrack of a generation. As creative director of the eponymous brand, NHOME, developed in limited partnership with home shopping network QVC, he developed and sold his own line of bedding and home accessories on the network. His products were often inspired by, and sometimes named for, members of his family.
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Ron Norsworthy was born in South Bend, Indiana, raised in Iowa and Illinois and received his bachelor’s degree with honors in architecture from Princeton University. In addition to his solo practice, Norsworthy is part of DARNstudio, an art collaboration with his husband and fellow artist, David Anthone.
Narcissus in a Fleetwood Chapel, 2024 Mixed media collage in relief on wood panel. Courtesy of Ron Norsworthy
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All presentations represent the opinions of the presenter and do not represent the position or the opinion of The Museum of Ideas.