Joseph Norman Exhibition Opening Reception + Gallery Conversation

An important American artist whose career as a printmaker and painter spans over forty years, Joseph Norman is considered by many art historians to be the most important African American lithographer of his generation. Currently a Professor of Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, Norman began his career in the 1980s teaching and exhibiting at the Newport Art Museum. Over the years, the Museum has been fortunate to acquire 61 paintings and prints by Norman, making it the largest museum collection of the artist’s work. Welcome to Joseph Norman: Works from the Permanent Collection.

Gallery Conversation at 6pm

Join the artist, Senior Curator Dr. Francine Weiss, painter Bob Dilworth, and Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at RISD, Dr. Christopher Roberts in the gallery to collectively consider issues and topics such as racial identity, portraiture, self-portraiture, history, and place, as seen through Norman’s powerful and evocative work.

Free, donations welcome.

Joseph Norman was born in Chicago in 1957 as the fifth of six children to parents who were the grandchildren of slaves. After earning his M.A. at the University of Illinois and an M.F.A. at the University of Cincinnati in 1986, he moved to Rhode Island to launch his career. It was then that he began teaching and exhibiting at the Newport Art Museum.

Norman is a Professor of Art at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia where has also served as the Chairman of the Painting and Drawing Department and Founder of Study Abroad in Latin America, Cuba, Costa Rica, Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands. A world class draftsman and printmaker, he has works of art in museum collections around the country, including the MoMA, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the RISD Museum among others.

Dr. Christopher Roberts, Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race in Art and Design and Assistant Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design and Experimental Foundation Studies, RISD.

Christopher Roberts earned a PhD in Africology and African American Studies from Temple University and an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University. He examines Black geographies of memory and forgetting, with an emphasis on port cities in the US that anchored the transatlantic and domestic slave trades. His current manuscript project proposes an alternative episteme through which we can unsettle the antiblackness and geographic imperialism inherent in the monumental landscape of the US via robust archival, field and digital humanities research that analyzes Confederate monuments and African burial grounds in the US American South. Prior to teaching at RISD, he taught at Brown University, where he was the Artemis AW and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Before that, he taught at Rutgers University in Camden, NJ and Temple University in Philadelphia.

Bob Dilworth received his MFA (1976) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA (1973) from the Rhode Island School of Design. Residencies include Anderson Ranch Art Center, CO; and the African American Master Artist in Residence Program (AAMARP), Northeastern University, Boston, MA; among many others. His work is held in numerous collections including the Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI: RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Chicago Public Library, Chicago, IL; The Barnett-Aden Gallery Collection, Washington, DC and the National Gallery of Art for the Corcoran Collection, Washington DC.