Norman David Daly

Norman D. Daly (August 9, 1911 - April 2, 2008), was an American artist who created the fictional Civilization of Llhuros along with hundreds of its artifacts, texts, and soundscapes. His work on The Civilization of Llhuros starting in the mid-1960s makes him the pioneering practitioner of an art genre now known as fictive archaeology.

Many passages in the exhibition catalog are likewise clearly meant to be funny. Daly felt that his art was serious in character but that the humor played a part in it; he told an interviewer:

Llhuros is here and now - a recasting of my 60 years of experience ... You know, people won't listen if you talk to them seriously. My show is like that Pennsylvania Dutch expression 'half in jest and all in earnest.

The Civilization of Llhuros was widely exhibited in the United States in the early 1970s. It received its largest presentation, as part of Projekt '74, at the Roman-Germanic Museum in Cologne in 1974. After 1974, Daly moved on to other projects. Significant aspects of Llhuros were again shown at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell in 2004. Llhuros experienced a renaissance beginning in 2017 when a sampling of objects was included in the Plurivers exhibition at La Panacée in Montpellier, France. Following that, in 2019 a full installation of "The Civilization of Llhuros" was featured at the Istanbul Biennial. Both exhibitions were under the direction of the renowned French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud.

In 2021, Antoinette LaFarge, a fictive practitioner herself, published Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax and Provocation. In this study, LaFarge described Llhuros as the prototype of the genre of fictive art.

In January 2026, the 150+ artifacts which comprise The Civilization of Llhuros were acquired by Cornell University, specifically the Anthropology Collaboratory, where the collection will be accessible to faculty, students and researchers. The websites and online catalog inventory will continue to be maintained by Norman Daly Art for the near future.