On display: 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.

- By MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS Special to the AmNews

Ron Norsworthy greets his friends and fans Nico and Nile Okoro (Michael Henry Adams photo)

(Michael Henry Adams)

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 said, “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.”