LESLIE HEWITT: ACHROMATIC SCALES Will Open At The Norton Museum Of Art This Fall

The Norton Museum of Art will present Leslie Hewitt: Achromatic Scales, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Leslie Hewitt (born 1977, New York; lives and works in Houston).

The show will bring together selections from three ongoing series—Riffs on Real Time, Riffs on Real Time with Ground, and Chromatic Grounds—exploring memory, poetics, and free association through photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation.

“Leslie Hewitt is an extraordinary contemporary artist whose conceptual practice explores the complex ways in which we understand time, history, and context through photography, texture, and color,” said Ghislain d’Humières, Kenneth C. Griffin Director and CEO of the Norton. “This exhibition marks a rare opportunity to experience three of her most significant ongoing series together.”

A first-of-its-kind U.S. presentation of these interwoven bodies of work, the exhibition will trace Hewitt’s layered approach to image-making—pairing achromatic still-life photographs that incorporate archival ephemera with richly saturated photograms distilled from the staging of those images. In Riffs on Real Time, Hewitt will turn to black-and-white analog processes, expanding the medium’s tonal range while foregrounding the sculptural physicality of arranged snapshots, magazines, books, and notes. Chromatic Grounds will translate those staged environments into camera-less fields of color, and Riffs on Real Time with Ground will reunite the achromatic and chromatic strands in tandem, inviting viewers to consider how photographs construct, compress, and complicate collective memory.

“I am thrilled to participate as one of the artists-in-residence at the Norton Museum of Art this year,” said Hewitt. “It creates space to develop new works of art and ideas alongside the exhibition and conversation with curator Lauren Richman and the general public.”

“Her densely layered photographs exemplify how different impressions of or assumptions about history can—and do—collide in the new context of her work,” added Lauren Richman, the Norton’s William and Sarah Ross Soter Senior Curator of Photography.

The exhibition is organized by the Norton Museum of Art with support from the William and Sarah Ross Soter Photography Fund. Hewitt is one of the Norton’s 2025 Artists-in-Residence, a program that supports mid- to late-career artists with on-site housing and studio access.