Norm Magnusson

Who is Norm Magnusson?

Norm Magnusson is a New York-based artist and political activist and founder, in 1991, of the art movement funism, he began his career creating allegorical animal paintings with pointed social commentaries. Eventually became more and more interested in political art and its potential for persuasion.

This led him away from the canvas and into the public realm where he created short videos that ran on U.S. national television prior to 2004's U.S. general election, viral emails and roadside historical markers with contemporary social content. The markers are part of the artist's proposed "New York State Thruway Project". Scheduled for 2012, it will place one marker in each of the 27 rest areas up and down the length of the NYS Thruway.

In the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art, The Springfield Museum of Art, The Anchorage Museum of History and Art, The Pember Museum and numerous other public and private collections, he has exhibited at these museums and for many years before it closed, at the infamous East Village-born Bridgewater/Lustberg Gallery in NYC. His sculptures of historical markers were shown as the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum's 2007 Main Street Sculpture Project, a show entitled "On this site stood." In his review of that exhibition for The New York Times, Ben Gennochio called Magnusson "The Michael Moore of the highways" for the very liberal "unsparing and pitiless candor" of his art, which focuses "our attention on pressing contemporary social and political issues."