Edwynn Houk Gallery is currently presenting "Ron Norsworthy: American Dream," a compelling exhibition running through December 23, 2025. This marks the artist's second solo exhibition with the prestigious New York gallery, featuring works that explore the complex relationship between aspiration and reality in Black middle-class domestic life.
The centerpiece of the exhibition consists of ten intricate collaged reliefs that envision domestic interiors of Black middle-class life in scenes that hover between achievement and dreams. These remarkable works are constructed from photographs layered up to four inches deep, creating a three-dimensional effect that blurs the line between photography and sculpture. The construction process remains deliberately visible through raw plywood edges, reflecting both the labor required for cultural advancement and the performance necessary to make such progress visible to society.
Complementing the relief works are three "Layer Maps," representing a new extension of Norsworthy's artistic process. These works on paper translate the layered construction techniques used in the reliefs into precise, color-blocked studies that offer viewers a different perspective on the artist's methodology. The maps serve as both standalone artworks and documentation of the complex building process behind the larger pieces.
At first glance, Norsworthy's carefully crafted interiors appear orderly and composed, presenting an image of stability and success. However, this apparent stability quickly reveals its fragile nature upon closer examination. Walls appear to tilt at impossible angles, mirrors create confusing doubles, and staircases lead mysteriously to unseen stories above. The architecture itself seems self-aware, functioning simultaneously as both material reality and powerful metaphor, revealing the underlying tension between genuine aspiration and carefully constructed artifice.
Throughout these fractured domestic spaces, human figures drift like ghosts, caught perpetually between motion and reflection. These inhabitants embody what renowned scholar W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as "double consciousness" – the psychological experience of viewing oneself through the eyes of a society that sees one's race as a problem. The figures seem to exist in a liminal space, neither fully present nor entirely absent from their own homes.
Norsworthy's visual vocabulary draws from an eclectic mix of sources, creating a democratic space where fragments of art history, popular film, interior design, and personal memory coexist on equal footing. Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams from the 1975 film "Mahogany" share space with Grant Wood's painting "Young Corn," while the iconic Black Jesus from the television show "Good Times" appears alongside lilies that the artist grew in his own garden. This deliberate mixing creates a visual lexicon that speaks to shared experiences within American culture.
The resulting artistic vision manages to be simultaneously intimate and collective, drawing from the vast reservoir of shared imagery that comprises American visual culture. Norsworthy approaches photography not merely as a medium for creating images, but as both a material substance and a cultural language that has profoundly shaped how America imagines and presents itself to the world.
Since photography's earliest days, the medium has served a dual purpose in American society – not only reflecting the ideals of the American Dream but actively helping to construct and maintain those ideals. Through carefully crafted images of prosperity, social belonging, and endless possibilities for self-invention, photography has created and continues to define the nation's self-image. Norsworthy's innovative constructions work to uncover the hidden scaffolding that supports these powerful ideals.
By foregrounding photography's physical presence and materiality, Norsworthy's work exposes both the visible and invisible structures that sustain the American Dream. His layered approach reveals how images are built, literally and figuratively, and how they function in society. Through this sophisticated merging of visual art and social commentary, "American Dream" reveals photography not as a simple reflection of reality, but as an active structure – the very vessel through which America continuously pictures and forms itself.
The exhibition is located at Edwynn Houk Gallery, 693 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10022, and will remain on view through December 23, 2025. Additional information about the exhibition and the gallery can be found at houkgallery.com.
