Ron Norsworthy's work is included in the Newark Museum's long-term exhibition "Seeing America: 18th & 19th Century," an ongoing display of nearly 80 artworks that reframe The Museum’s historical American art collection to foreground slavery and Black and Indigenous history.
With 13 new artworks by contemporary artists of color in dialogue with the historical collection, Seeing America centers often-overlooked subjects and critical perspectives. Painting and sculpture—including colonial era portraiture, neo-classical sculpture, and Hudson River School painting—are placed in context with historic photographs, objects of daily use, and site-specific contemporary art.
Norsworthy's "The New Room (Allegory no. 3)," 2021 was acquired by the Newark Museum in 2022. In this work, Norsworthy reimagines a room inside Mount Vernon called the New Room, mixing historical details with an Afro-futurist vision. The main figures at the center are from a Sidney Poitier film, Uptown Saturday Night (1974) . Behind them, a painting of two Black people pruning a tree honors enslaved laborers at Mount Vernon. Norsworthy excerpted these figures from Grant Wood's painting that celebrates a myth from Washington's childhood.
