The Brooklyn Rail

Is there any drug more potent, more lethal, and more glamorous than the American dream?

Ron Norsworthy’s American Dream, on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery, stages this question not as provocation but as philosophical adventure. The exhibition unfolds through a suite of shadowbox tableaux and layered collages. These are not nostalgic reconstructions of material comfort so much as anatomical studies of its pressures. As one winds through the gallery, the weight of a question persists: what happens when the dream is not deferred, but demanded—snatched, dissected, splayed open, and pinned delicately in place?

Norsworthy’s signature strategy—cut photographic figures embedded in shallow architectural spaces—produces a feeling of seduction bound tightly to enclosure. No matter how close one approaches the frame, his works retain the aura of something glimpsed rather than entered, private yet cinematic, intimate yet hermetic. Norsworthy’s aesthetic absorbs material pleasure through the most rapacious Epicurean exclusivity, where abundance is total—damn-near sacred and yet never fully secure. In his world, living rooms, staircases, dining areas, or manicured lawns are treated as Impressionistic mise-en-scènes: each space is exquisitely appointed, yet subtly unstable, constantly in motion.

In Tonya Lewis Lee and Children (2005–2025), Norsworthy presents a portrait of authority that refuses apology. The central figure stands between her children wearing an expression that could best be described as serene confidence. Though she wears an emerald-diamond brooch pinned on the right shoulder of her black dress, it is her eyes that seem to precede her environment. They are jewels themselves as sharp as her posture, her composure. She is flanked by doves, which suggests benevolence, protection, and a note of melancholy. Holding a white rose with gloved hands, she embodies a mode of decorum that feels beyond contemporary times. But her son’s roller skates give away her present-day relevance. What unsettles some viewers is not luxury itself, but fixity, a kind of certainty, as if she is certain of both her indefinable worth and the armored futures of her progeny. In a racial and cultural imagination that continues to code womanhood, beauty, privilege, and abundance as “white,” the presence of Black elegance within the domestic sphere challenges stunted perceptions. Norsworthy’s work is not didactic, and he does not care to argue against any association. If his gift as an artist prioritizes anything, it is simply presentation—not presentation as a flat, stiff word to be said in a clinical tone, but presentation as a three-syllable totalizing way of life, as in, “pre-sent-tation,” a code of conduct reiterated by the rising lilt in the voices of parents raised to embody the bare minimum that is Black excellence.

A Different World (2025) exemplifies this doubled condition: two children sit transfixed before a glowing television set in an opulent living room, their bodies positioned in rapt attention on a checkerboard floor. Above them, an ornate tin ceiling suggests old-world craftsmanship, while a blue-framed niche holds a watching figure—guardian or witness. A birdcage, damask sofa, checkered rug, and gilt mirror accumulate like evidence of achievements, yet the staircase ascending into darkness and the golden light fixture enclosing its own miniature garden read as much like containment as comfort. The television becomes more than furniture; it functions as a relay point for the dream’s pharmacology, transmitting images of normalcy, success, and threat. What is being learned here is not simply how to desire, but how to endure—to sit still, to watch, to wait.

The exhibition’s temporal play is crucial. Trying to Remember the Future (2025) compresses decades into a single still life of white lilies in full bloom, butterflies pinned mid-flight, a family photograph, a clock marking time, and an open, face down book suggesting accumulated knowledge. Behind these objects, a car and purple-patterned wallpaper blur past and present. The title’s paradox captures something essential about living inside of dreams predescribed—the way aspirational thinking demands anticipation of a future that may never arrive while clinging to a past that promised more than it delivered. Memory and projection collapse into an eternal present tense of vigilance.

Norsworthy is acutely attentive to masculinity and its contradictions. In Coming and Going (2025), a man stands beside a gleaming black sedan in the driveway of an immaculate white colonial house, while a woman in a suede jacket donning a triumphant Afro is on her way inside. A kite floats in the cloudless sky; red flowers dot the walkway. I am haunted by what I feel to be their isolation. The man’s posture, his slightly hunched shoulder, suggests to me labor without rest, strength without refuge. The woman’s back is turned, her hand still holding a cloth that has certainly added to the sparkle of the gleaming Cadillac parked outside. Their pastoral backdrop feels like a stage set where stability must be continually performed. I am reminded of those who are raised to take care of things yet who so often forget to take care of themselves.

Formal mastery is everywhere evident. In More or Less (2025), a mid-century modern living room unfolds in warm wood tones, geometric abstraction, and carefully curated detail. A woman in elegant attire moves through the foreground while a man stands in contemplation by the window. But the space fractures: a diagonal beam splits the composition, a vertiginous staircase leads into shadow, abstraction intrudes upon realism like a psychic rupture. These interruptions feel diagnostic, as if the image itself were glitching under the strain of coherence.

Good Life 1988 (2025) pushes this instability further. A checkerboard ceiling—orange, cream, black, and burgundy—dominates the composition with hallucinatory intensity. Below it, a sumptuous sitting room unfolds with decorative screens, a crystal chandelier, and a plush velvet daybed. Two figures occupy the space in states of repose and attention, surrounded by objects that signify taste, acquisition, care. Yet the ceiling threatens to collapse the room into pattern, as if suggesting that no accumulation of beauty, no cash-down accretion can guarantee structural integrity. Norsworthy understands collage not as fragmentation for its own sake, but as ethical necessity. Wholeness, in these works, would be a lie.

The exhibition’s relationship to Dorothy West’s literary excavations of Black bourgeois life and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s theory of signifying deepens its conceptual resonance. West’s novels critique a society that practiced genteel tokenism while feigning inclusion. Norsworthy extends this critique visually, understanding the domestic sphere as a stage where signifying—oblique, coded commentary on power—occurs daily. His immaculate interiors denote respectability politics, revealing how middle-class families must perform stability while knowing these same spaces offer inadequate protection.

In It's Been a Day (2025), an ornate dining room is viewed from a slightly altered angle, revealing how completely the space choreographs its inhabitants. Adults stand guard but they, too, are enclosed, silhouetted against décor that feels heavier than ornamental. Mirrors recur, but reflection offers no escape; it only doubles the self, multiplying responsibility. During the opening, a woman standing before the work remarked that however gorgeous Norsworthy’s art was, the settings unsettled her. She declared them “all wrong,” saying she would rather see how his figures “really lived.” The comment—ignorant and liquor-produced—revealed the expectations the work refuses to satisfy. Norsworthy neither mocks aspiration nor romanticizes resistance. The current of tenderness that runs through the exhibition is more sinister than gentle. Norsworthy seems to offer a care that anticipates injury. The American dream, these works suggest, is not something one either believes in or rejects. It is something one is raised inside of—like a house immaculately maintained, even as it quietly collapses—where every surface sparkles but the foundation is rotting. It is a place where you learn to stand perfectly still so the floors, however gleaming, don’t give way beneath you. If Dorothy West understood that survival requires both armor and impeccable grace, “a sheathing of the spirit” with pride for those always “inspected like specimens under glass,” Norsworthy’s worlds suggest that even horrors handled exceptionally well cost much more than a pretty penny.