Adri Norris is a multidisciplinary artist whose life has spanned the Caribbean, New York, New Mexico, and service in the United States Marine Corps. These varied cultural experiences deeply inform her practice. She has developed a wide range of skills across traditional and digital media, including ink, acrylic, watercolor, Photoshop, Blender, and InDesign.

Over time, her work has increasingly focused on the broader societal forces that shape history, particularly the ways Black history is constructed, challenged, and rewritten. Norris has immersed herself in the study of history and applied that research to the artwork she creates. It began with the Women Behaving Badly series in 2016—portraits of women who pursued their goals in the face of societal opposition. Rather than focusing only on likeness, Norris used backgrounds to communicate each subject’s work, context, and historical moment.

Over time, Norris became more interested in the societal context itself. She began questioning why things are the way they are—studying government, laws, social movements, and the backlash that follows them. She sees history not as a straight line, but as a rope that twists and doubles back on itself: rights gained in one era can be lost, almost simultaneously, in another.

This framework led to a series of abstract paintings illustrating how Black history manifests and is sometimes obscured by prevailing cultural narratives. In some works, white ropes overlay brown ones, overwhelming them with linear storytelling. In others, rope silhouettes suggest the limitations of undetailed understanding. After long avoiding abstraction, Norris now trusts viewers to draw their own conclusions and welcomes the discussions the work sparks.