Press — RON NORSWORTHY

PrEsS

Telling Stories of Black Life Rescued Him
The New York Times

Ron Norsworthy, a visual artist and designer, could slot easily into popular culture’s ideal of the hero: He is a man of relentless self-invention. He studied architecture at Princeton, worked for a year as a designer with Michael Graves, and, after being laid off, remodeled himself into an art director and production designer for widely-recognized hip-hop groups in the 1990s (among them Missy Elliott, Busta Rhymes and Salt-N-Pepa).

Ron Norsworthy Faves
Litchfield Magazine

As an artist and designer whose work combines practices from multiple disciplines, including the decorative arts and architecture, I’m always on the lookout for interesting things with stories to tell. These objects not only delight aesthetically, they reveal something of those who’ve created them. Their histories comprised of struggles and successes are often conveyed in the work through materials, composition, and ornament. I find this silent exchange between maker and viewer, endlessly enriching to my practice.

Reflections
essay by Horace Ballard

I am often given over to lyricism so let me speak/write it plain. The works of Another Country presented in the exhibition Heirlooms are not quilts; or, not only so. They are road signs. They are portraits of American heartbreak. The works represent our shared, if fractured inheritance of intimacy and inequity. They are the heirlooms of a civilization in crisis. There now. There we have it. So let’s begin at the beginning…

Power To The Paper
I.D. Magazine

“They’ll see, amid the paper’s treillage of trees and vines , shoeless black kids frolicking around toilets and flies. If future scholarship goes well, historians will eventually figure out that one generation of rowhouse tenants wanted to mock traditional pastoral scenes while somewhat humorously protesting stereotypes and bigotry. In other words, these walls will be able to talk.”

Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto
Camilo Jose Vergara, Timothy J. Gilfoyle

“Reparation Tower” is a cool and ironic image of an upturned black fist exhibited at the Studio usem in Harlem in the 2004 architecture show Harlemworld , Metropolis as Metaphor organized by Thelma Golden. The proposal by architect Ron Norsworthy for a forty-story luxury high-rise shaped like that of the black power salute reads: “History, Destiny, Luxury.” p. 162

Looking Closer 5: Critical Writings on Graphic Design
Edited by Michael Bierut, William Drenttel and Steven Heller

Another commentary on the fate of Black Power was evident in Ron Norsworthy’s design for a huge, fist-shaped reparation Tower included int he show Harlemworld at the Studio Museum of Harlem in 2004. The imagined design commented on the gentrifucation of Harlem by imagining a luxury apartment tower in the shape of a Black Power fist financed by payments made for slavery reparations.”

Metaphors Rise in Harlem
The New York Times

The age of irony hasn’t ended in Harlem, it would appear. Several of the show’s projects focus on the collision between the new signs of upscale living and Harlem’s conventional associations with the urban underclass. The most mordant of these is a full-scale sales office for ‘’Reparation Tower, Harlem,’’ a luxury high-rise designed in the form of an upraised fist.

Love Central: Four Designers Create Plans for the New City Wedding Bureau
New York Magazine

New York City’s marriage bureau—currently on the second floor of the Municipal Building at One Centre Street—is an uninspiring warren of glass partitions and banana-yellow walls. But later this year a new bureau will be unveiled inside a city-owned building at 141 Worth Street, the recipient of an ongoing $15 million renovation overseen by society decorator Jamie Drake. We wondered how other local designers might approach the challenge of creating the ultimate New York wedding chapel. Here are four of their dream scenarios.

A Review of: Race and Revolution: Reimagining Monuments
Believer Magazine

The group exhibition at Old Stone House is meant to interrogate this inequity, featuring works that question the stories of the “Great White Men” cast in bronze and marble and affixed to plinths across the city. It also offers works that imagine beyond those men and suggest other people and events, that might be worthy of remembering and honoring, and how this might be accomplished. Each work on display provides a plan for a new monument, one that honors or mourns an overlooked hero or remembers a suppressed tragedy.

New Art in Newark
The Architect’s Newspaper

One of the commissioned artists, Ron Norsworthy, mapped Newark’s diverse communities onto 11.5-by-35 inch and 4.5-by-22 inch murals in Audible’s cafe. In that piece, called Norkaleidoscope, he exhausted “every color in the crayon box,” so to speak. Newark landmarks are depicted in vibrant colors and are placed together to complex mirrored patterns (this is suggested in the title of the piece, which is a play on the local pronunciation of Newark, “Nork,” and “kaleidoscope”).

9 Artists to watch at the Governors Island Art Fair
Artnet

Both a couple and an artist duo, David Anthone and Ron Norsworthy are perhaps working harder than anyone else in the fair. “We’ll be sewing the whole time,” Anthone told artnet News, as the two men sat in the room, carefully stitching together matchbooks into massive quilts for their series “Another Country.”

Future Designs on Harlem
The Studio Museum in Harlem Magazine

While laboring to envision the future architectural environment of Harlem, I was continuously haunted by an image of Ron Norsworthy’s Reparation Tower exhibited in theStudio Museum’s harlemworld: Metropolis as \Metaphor exhibition in 2005...