Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach County, Florida

Photograph: Norton Museum of Art front at dusk.jpg by Nortonedits · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Palm Beach County attraction

Norton Museum of Art

Palm Beach County · South Florida & the Keys

Founded by a Chicago steel executive who retired to Palm Beach and decided South Florida should have a museum of its own. Open since February 1941.

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ABOUT THIS PLACE

Ralph Hubbard Norton ran the Acme Steel Company in Chicago and collected paintings and sculpture with his wife Elizabeth. When he semi-retired in 1935 the couple began spending their time in the Palm Beaches, and rather than leave the collection to a city that already had museums they founded one here, to give South Florida its first. Marion Sims Wyeth designed the Art Deco building and it opened on February 8, 1941. The permanent collection now runs to more than 8,900 works across European, American, Asian, contemporary and photography departments, and since 2011 the museum has given a solo exhibition each year to a living woman painter or sculptor under its Recognition of Art by Women series. The building has been expanded several times since 1941, though the Art Deco front Marion Sims Wyeth designed is still the face of it. Founding a museum here rather than in Chicago was a deliberate choice: the Nortons wanted the work where there was none, and the Norton is still the anchor of the art scene in West Palm Beach

GETTING THERE

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