Cecil Norris makes paintings and drawings that draw on the canon and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of race, masculinity, sexuality, and trauma through the act of portraiture. Norris’s paintings disrupt the tropes of classical portraiture through the juxtaposition of black culture. Examining the urban fabric, Norris aims to blur the lines of realism and abstraction to reveal something that has been lost from history and investigate the ambiguity and perplexity of black identity.



Cecil Norris was born in 1995 in Shelby, North Carolina, where he currently lives and works. Norris received a BoA from the School of Architecture at UNC at Charlotte. He is now an art teacher at Crest High School, where he hopes to cultivate a new age of artists.