NAVIN NORLING // ARTIST HIGHLIGHT

Today we highlight San Francisco-born artist Navin Norling's most recent appearance on The Strand Podcast, where they discuss Norling's Dangerous Games exhibition earlier this year.

Navin Norling, Dangerous Games. Installation view, 2026.

Kevin Kirkwood, the host of The Strand Podcast, recently visited Navin’s studio to talk about the objects, places, and histories that have shaped his art and practice. Norling’s work spans painting, assemblage, reclaimed windows, salvaged signage, and found objects: materials pulled from the edges of American life and reassembled into layered visual narratives. His practice draws on family history, folk traditions, quilting, and the vernacular of both rural and urban America, transforming discarded things into work that holds memory, identity, and cultural inheritance.

In this conversation, he and Kevin trace the environments that formed him, including the lasting influence of artist Raymond Saunders, and how time in New York deepened his thinking about race, class, and Americana.

They also discuss his exhibition Dangerous Games at Johnson Lowe, exploring the role of whitewashing, visibility, and erasure in his work, and how beauty, humor, and materiality can hold difficult histories.

Navin Norling, Dangerous Games. Installation view, 2026.

Dangerous Games emerged from a moment defined by uncertainty, repetition, and historical amnesia. The exhibition took its title from a lowbrow French comic book from the 1960s, a phrase that initially appealed to the artist for its cinematic quality. Over time, the words took on greater weight, becoming a way to describe the social and political conditions shaping contemporary American life today. These are dangerous times, and the systems we move through every day increasingly feel like games whose rules are unstable and unevenly enforced.

Working with found materials such as old windows, scrap wood, metal, lace, and everyday objects, Norling builds layered works that reference American iconography while questioning the narratives attached to it. His use of salvaged materials connects the work to folk traditions and to street art, which he understands as a contemporary form of folk expression. Familiar surfaces and objects create an entry point, disarming the viewer through nostalgia and material recognition before revealing more complex and troubling histories beneath.

About Navin Norling

In his ongoing practice, Navin Norling (b. 1970) examines classic Americana imagery and assembles miscellanea out of popular culture signifiers, sayings, folklore, and materialism.

During his upbringing, Norling would spend summers on his grandfather's farm in California's Central Valley, where all resources were reused without any waste. The impact of that rural setting led him to embrace salvaged components and eventually integrate assemblage and bricolage techniques into his formal training as a painter. But apart from those summers, Navin grew up in suburban California and spent his youth in wild exploration across the Bay Area; part of a generation committed to establishing a personal aesthetic framework, whether in the use of graffiti monikers or wheat paste messaging. He has been vicariously loyal to that urban grit and has maintained a street palette in his work.