Contemporary Art and Culture
In February 2025, at a gathering of artists and friends, William Norton learned that two gallery spaces—#104 and #108—at 37 North 15th Street, Greenpoint, Brooklyn had become available. He had one week to assemble two exhibitions. He accepted the challenge.
William Norton’s large-scale paintings at The Boiler – ELM Foundation evoke imagery of oppression and protest through gestural graphic marks and bold color on recycled vinyl advertisements as canvas. “We are always being sold something in this age of hyper-ventilating propaganda. And there is just enough of the advertising image left over to titillate the viewers’ eyeballs,” Norton says.
Fellow Travelers, PeepShow Space’s fifth and final exhibition, features the work of Joshua Rosenblatt, Jason Phillips and William Norton. The three artists reflect on travel, which at this moment is impossible in their lives as they shelter, wait and dream about places that no longer exist, except in memory.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.
William Norton’s medium of choice is a mixture of drawing and carving, using a dremel and a router to carve lines by hand into large plexiglass sheets, letting light be what illuminates the artwork through casting shadows and reflections. Working from charcoal drawings and photographs all the work is autobiographical in nature, mostly an attempt to understand what it means to be a man, an issue that’s plagued him for decades stemming from the moment his 4 year old son was kidnapped and disappeared.
In Size Matters artist and curator William Norton brings together seventeen visual artists and four performance artists from Japan, China, the USA, and the UAE, for whom the notion of scale is central. The curator questions in what ways does scale impact form? How does it affect meaning? And more specifically, how is our perception of scale affected by cultural differences between Asian and Western cultures?
POP GOES THE WEASEL- An exhibition that asks the question “why not”?
[caption id="attachment_890" align="aligncenter" width="500"] POP GOES THE WEASEL, installation view, photo courtesy of the curator[/caption]The group show “Pop Goes The Weasel” at The Williamsburg Art and Historical Society brings together a group of nineteen artists from Japan and the US, fifteen women and four men who are working in seemingly disparate ways. Curator and artist William Norton presents his premise as “Why not”? Why not bring together artists who simply share their pathos, political intent, psychological depth ,a love of materials, and above all, their joy in creating art?