BIOGRAPHY
Ron Norsworthy is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice currently centers on intricately constructed collages in relief that blur distinctions between photography, sculpture, painting, and installation. Raised in the Midwest and a graduate of Princeton University, Norsworthy’s work explores embodied identity through objects, spaces, and immersive environments.
His domestic scenes hover between the familiar and the imagined with an uncanny nuance. Norsworthy’s interiors initially appear orderly, but their stability soon falters. Often set in a nebulous past, these spaces feel remembered rather than recorded: ceilings loom and slant, walls veer, mirrors reflect other realms (or states of being), and staircases lead to unseen levels. His figures drift through these fractured rooms, caught between motion and reflection, inhabiting what W. E. B. Du Bois notably described as double consciousness. Within Norsworthy’s worlds, visual fragments of art history, film, design, cultural and personal memory comingle on equal ground.
Trained as an architect and a former production designer for iconic music videos, Norsworthy composes cinematic tableaux with a distinct spatial poetics that suggest–as much as they conceal–endless narratives. His signature technique merges digital composition with meticulous hand construction: Layered plywood cutouts, edges exposed, extend out through the picture plane, contrasting process with depiction. For Norsworthy, this interplay between structure and surface complicates perception and underscores identity as something constructed, staged, and perpetually negotiated.
His work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Newark Museum of Art, New-York Historical Society, and others, with solo exhibitions at Project for Empty Space, Long Gallery Harlem, and Edwynn Houk Gallery. He has participated in major international fairs including Art Basel Miami Beach, The Armory Show, AIPAD Photography Show, and Paris Photo.
Norsworthy has completed residencies at Project for Empty Space and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He has been awarded an Artistic Excellence Grant from the Connecticut Office of the Arts and nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and for the USA Fellowship Award. His work is widely published and held in private and institutional collections worldwide. He also collaborates with his husband, fellow artist David Anthone, as DARNstudio.