Can art thrive in NFT world? Rockwell museum thinks so

Norman Rockwell’s art has seemingly been everywhere. It adorned The Saturday Evening Post and Boy’s Life covers. His illustrations were splashed across ads for Coca–Cola and inside beloved children’s books. His art hangs in a number of prestigious museums and was even displayed in the White House during Barack Obama’s presidency to celebrate Ruby Bridges. And now, Rockwell’s work is entering a new frontier: non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., in partnership with Iconic, an art platform and agency focused on bringing digital innovation to cultural institutions, is launching a series of NFTs from its extensive archive of Rockwell’s work with a focus on his creative process. 

The museum is among a slowly growing trend of art institutions embracing the financial and artistic realm of digital collecting, potentially opening new avenues of financial stability for museums and expanding the idea of art and its value in a digital age.

“Studio Sessions: The Norman Rockwell Collection” pulls from more than 18,000 process works, including color studies, model sessions, thumbnail sketches and complete drawings. Each NFT set, billed as a “session” by Iconic and the museum, will include a selection of these studies themed around one of Rockwell’s paintings.

“What we’re super excited about is to be able to share Norman Rockwell’s creativity that is represented in the archival collection, which has not been seen to the degree of the art collection, which hangs on our wall, goes on exhibition, (and) is typically more published in books — it’s been more accessible,” said museum CEO and Director Laurie Norton Moffatt.

The first “session” features eight process works from Rockwell’s self-reflective work “Waiting for the Art Editor,” created circa 1970. Among the works selected for the inaugural NFT drop are one color and one charcoal study, a set of photographs from model sessions, two portraits of Rockwell modeling character expressions and one contact sheet that features portraits of the artist working on the painting in his studio. Each work will be available to purchase with a credit card or Ethereum, a form of cryptocurrency, through Iconic’s website later this month. Interested buyers can sign up for updates online.

Collectors will also receive a museum quality print of the NFT, which Iconic CEO Chris Cummings describes as “one purchase in two mediums” instead of an either-or question of prints versus digital.

“It is a powerful, co-equal pairing,” Cummings said. “We believe that this pairing of print and digital editions will appeal to a wide range of potential collectors.”

So what makes an NFT more special than saving the digital image of these works from Iconic’s website or the online version of this article? For a collector, it lies in the blockchain, a digital ledger built from a unique series of codes. The blockchain records the NFT’s ownership and provenance, Cummings said, lending authenticity to the NFT, in this case certifying it comes from Rockwell’s archives at the museum.

As for the confusion around the emerging technology, Cummings equates NFTs to two other acronyms: DVDs and VCRs. Like DVD and VCR, NFT refers to a technology that carries information — real estate can even be conducted through NFTs, Cummings said. In this instance, the information is art, and the technology gives the museums a better way to track the art and its provenance while expanding its audience.

“People around the world see Norman Rockwell, know his name, but how many people ever get a chance to come to the Norman Rockwell Museum in person, in comparison to how many people know of Rockwell?” Cummings said.

“Studio Sessions,” Norton Moffatt said, is a continuation of the museum’s digitization efforts that began 20 years ago with ProjectNORMAN, a 10 year effort to preserve and catalog the museum’s collection and make it publicly accessible online; the effort continued in 2014 with the digitization of about 50,000 black-and-white photographs from Rockwell’s archive. 

The museum had been researching NFTs for several years, though it was waiting for the right partner and time, Norton Moffatt said. Iconic, with its focus on working with museums to create a curated marketplace of NFT art, was the ideal collaborator, and, with the museum stabilized after the COVID-19 pandemic, now was a good time to launch. Plus, the Rockwell family expressed a shared interest in exploring the digital realm further.

“We were having one of our meetings a couple of years ago and we each brought the topic to each other,” Norton Moffatt said. “So clearly, we had been looking at this new audience and new art opportunity together.”

“We actively seek out and welcome ways to diversify our revenue through new projects and new funding sources that align with our mission, as this collaboration does,” Norton Moffatt said.

As far as market concerns, the museum isn’t worried, Norton Moffatt said, noting all markets, including the art market, tend to fluctuate. And while the NFT explosion a couple years ago — which included the $69 million sale of an NFT by artist Beeple at Christie’s — created an inorganic growth, the market is steady, Cummings said. 

“If you look at year on year, people collecting digital art, engaging with digital art, all those numbers are one of the healthiest growing sectors in art worldwide. And it’s one in which it’s here to stay,” Cummings said.

With “Studio Sessions,” the Norman Rockwell Museum joins a small but growing group of museums integrating NFTs into their programming. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston sold NFTs of Degas and Monet pastel drawings too fragile to be displayed, and the British Museum created NFTs of its Hokusai and J.M.W. Turner paintings. In Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art bought several NFTs for its collection.

What sets the Norman Rockwell Museum apart from its peers, though, is its focus on Rockwell’s process works, not his famous, completed illustrations, said Heather Nolin, founder and creative director of Nolin Consulting, a firm focused on advancing creativity, innovation and thoughtful leadership in the nonprofit arts and humanities sector.

“I applaud that they’re taking a novel approach because I have not heard of any museums or collection-focused institutions, like libraries and archives … taking this approach to NFTs,” Nolin said. “It’s not just taking a beloved picture, for instance, like (Van Gogh’s) ‘The Night Cafe,’ and producing an NFT.”

As Iconic’s team began reviewing the Norman Rockwell Museum’s archives, the creative process documentation leapt out, Cummings said. 

“In these works you could feel his passion, his sense of humor, his thoughtful and sometimes complicated relationship with the subject matter and how hard he worked to perfect the slightest expression,” he said.

While many are familiar with the artist’s finished work, the museum noticed a curiosity among its visitors on how he created them, Norton Moffatt said. The theme, while different from other museums’ approaches to NFTs, made sense.

“This medium became an opportunity to connect the world with a new aspect of our museum collections that people love, but rarely have a chance to see,” Norton Norton Moffatt said. “People are so fascinated by Rockwell’s working process which was extremely meticulous.”

When approaching NFTs, museums have to balance the philosophical with the financial, said Nolin, who co-authored “Non-Fungible Tokens and Nonprofit Management” for “The Oxford Handbook of Arts and Cultural Management” with NFT market expert Amy Whitaker. Nonprofits need finances to keep their lights on, but it can’t abandon its mission in the process. Nolin said the Norman Rockwell Musuem’s model is a good balance of these values because of how it’s focused on growing its audience and expanding access to the archive while raising money for the institution.

The Norman Rockwell Museum and Iconic have sessions planned to drop monthly over the next few months, Norton Moffatt said, and, if this is successful, more can be created from Rockwell’s vast archives. Moffatt also hopes contemporary illustrators may want to partner with the museum to create their own NFTs, seeing the digital world as the next logical exploration for illustration.

“The limited digital edition collections that now people are enjoying and consuming is consistent with how illustration has always partnered with new technology to make images available to people across many platforms, with many different ways to take beautiful imagery into their lives,” Norton Moffatt said.