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As Alanna Heiss said about him, he has nothing left to lose, so he gets it done.

He’s had an unusual career arc. In 1983, on NYC Channel 7 News, he was scientifically proven to be NYC’s Number 1 Male Stripper. Being a stripper afforded him the opportunity to work full time in his studio and focus on his career. From stripping he went straight to teaching Welded Steel Sculpture at Columbia University for 10 years. (The job at Columbia came to an end when his 4 year old son was kidnapped and disappeared, leaving him unable to focus on his art for several years).

He built sets for Michael Jackson, Madonna, Maria Carey, and developed real estate.

He was the Director of Installations at MOMA/PS1 for 3 1/2 years.

Starting in 2015 he’s independently curated 36 exhibitions, in the NYC area and Japan and has been in over 60.

During the Pandemic he was the director of PeepShow Space, (-the gallery LTD-), in Greenpoint for 15 months, giving multiple artists visibility and exposure when it was needed most.

By giving over 150 artists a platform in the shows he’s curated he was able to rekindle his career along with their’s.

William Norton’s work has always been autobiographical and personal in nature, connecting his roots growing up as a child of a military family in Japan to the complex history of dealing with the kidnapping and disappearance of his 4 year old son in 1990. Since that time he’s been focused on the question of what it means to become a moral man in this world, especially as he was ultimately powerless to protect his son from his fate. Having grown up in a military family the rites and rituals of transitioning to manhood had been laid out for him from the beginning: Boot camp, discipline, chain of command, trust and blind allegiance to superiors and subjugation of self to a greater machine. He consciously rebelled against that simplistic path after being exposed to Japanese aesthetics.
During the last few years he’s been investigating the testosterone overdrive that fuels the clone-like anonymity and militarization of the police state’s manhood myths, as most recently exemplified by the brutal response by the Hong Kong government during the Umbrella Movement’s protests for democracy and our government’s continued slave state mentality against BLM. This fed the imagery of his last Solo Show “Styx & Stones: It’s Raining Fascists” at The Boiler 191 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

In his current antiwar series he is combining Japan’s Mount Fuji with Picasso’s Guernica. Make of that what you will.

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