Telling Stories of Black Life Rescued Him
The New York Times
The designer Ron Norsworthy explores his own experiences of marginalization in his textiles, installations and quilts.
ROXBURY, Conn. — 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).
While at first the art direction work was exciting, Norsworthy said, “I realized in the late ’90s that the hip-hop music video world was one [where] I found myself marginalized.”
In the early 2000s he created his own multidisciplinary design firm, the Norsworthy Fund, and in 2011, with his self-developed NHOME brand, became one of the first African-American men to sell his own line on QVC. Within the last two decades he has recognized himself, at his core, as an artist.
