Norton Museum Mimi Plumb and Gertrude Abercrombie: Two Solo Shows Open Together

The Norton Museum Mimi Plumb and Gertrude Abercrombie exhibitions open on the same day, in the same building, and they could hardly look less alike. One is 107 black-and-white photographs of California suburbs, reservoirs and altered land. The other is some 70 paintings of cats, moons, bare trees and empty rooms, dreamed up in Chicago. The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach opens both solo shows on 31 October 2026, and they run through March 2027, according to CityBiz.

Information verified through 31 October 2026.

Norton Museum Mimi Plumb and Gertrude Abercrombie, side by side

The pairing is deliberate. Presented concurrently, the exhibitions invite visitors to consider how artists transform their surroundings into expressions of personal and collective experience — Plumb finding psychological tension in observed scenes, Abercrombie building imagined worlds from dreams, memory and recurring symbols, CityBiz reported. The museum says the shows mark the first presentations of this scale for either artist in the region, and continue its effort to expand recognition of women artists whose work has historically received limited attention.

“The exhibitions by Mimi Plumb and Gertrude Abercrombie reflect the Norton’s commitment to highlighting women artists who have challenged the way we perceive and understand ourselves and the world around us,” said Ghislain d’Humières, the museum’s director and CEO, in remarks reported by BroadwayWorld.

Blazing Light photographs by Mimi Plumb: 54 years, four bodies of work

Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb is billed as Plumb’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It gathers 107 black-and-white photographs spanning 1971 to 2025, mixing vintage gelatin silver prints with more recently produced pigment inkjet prints, according to CityBiz.

The work comes in four bodies: The White Sky, Landfall, The Golden City and The Reservoir. Together they examine American life during the final decades of the Cold War and its aftermath, tracing tensions between people and the environments they inhabit, CityBiz reported. Born in California in 1953, Plumb began photographing as a teenager in Walnut Creek, a San Francisco suburb undergoing rapid development, and her early work took shape amid growing awareness of global warming, the AIDS epidemic and the threat of nuclear war, BroadwayWorld reported.

“Since the 1970s, Mimi Plumb has been a keen observer of her surroundings, recording the subtle tensions and psychological undercurrents that shape everyday encounters with the landscape and built environment,” said Lauren Richman, the Norton’s senior curator of photography, in CityBiz. The exhibition was organised by Gregory Harris of the High Museum of Art and is curated at the Norton by Richman, with a catalogue co-published by Radius Books and the High Museum. Plumb, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, spoke with Harris at the museum’s Art After Dark event on 30 October, the night before the opening, according to Palm Beach Illustrated.

Palm Beach Illustrated put the contrast bluntly: Plumb’s photography “blazes with truth,” staged in four bodies of work chronicling anxieties from the tail end of the Cold War onward, including the growing awareness of global warming and the AIDS epidemic, Palm Beach Illustrated reported.

Gertrude Abercrombie Whole World Is a Mystery: a diary in paint

Across the museum, the register flips inward. Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery brings together approximately 70 paintings from institutional and private collections and is described as the most comprehensive museum presentation of Abercrombie’s work to date, according to CityBiz.

Abercrombie (1909–1977) built a highly personal surrealism from recurring imagery — cats, owls, moons, doors, barren trees, seashells and masked figures — set in stark interiors and seemingly uninhabited landscapes, drawing frequently on her own dreams to explore isolation and a search for belonging, CityBiz reported. She was a central figure in Chicago’s Hyde Park arts community and hosted gatherings that brought visual artists together with jazz musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie.

“Her paintings are her diary,” said Regina Palm, the Norton’s senior curator of modern art, in CityBiz. “They are revelatory as they illustrate not only the innermost thoughts and feelings of the artist but also document the happenings of her time from the jazz scene of Chicago to the civil rights movement.” Palm Beach Illustrated counted more than five dozen paintings offering “a glimpse into her hyper-individual surrealist perspective,” Palm Beach Illustrated reported.

The show is co-organised by Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art, with Palm curating the Norton presentation, according to CityBiz.

Norton Museum exhibitions October 2026: what to know before you go

Both Norton Museum exhibitions October 2026 run to mid-March — through 14 March 2027 in the dates given by Palm Beach Illustrated. The museum, founded in 1941, sits at 1450 South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach and underwent a major Foster + Partners expansion that opened in 2019, CityBiz noted.

The opening weekend comes with programming attached. A closer look at the Abercrombie show follows on 11 November, and a Book and Art session built around it lands on 14 November, according to Palm Beach Illustrated.

Analysis: Two firsts anchor the season — a photographer’s first US solo museum show, more than five decades into her career, and a painter’s most comprehensive presentation, nearly fifty years after her death. Put together, they make the Norton’s point without a wall label needing to shout it: the canon is still being revised, one overdue retrospective at a time.

Photo: Gertrude Abercrombie, The Stroll (1943), Smithsonian American Art Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Sources

1. https://www.citybiz.co/article/927295/norton-museum-of-art-to-present-solo-exhibitions-by-mimi-plumb-and-gertrude-abercrombie/
2. https://www.broadwayworld.com/miami/article/Norton-Museum-of-Art-to-Present-Solo-Exhibitions-by-Mimi-Plumb-and-Gertrude-Abercrombie-20261007
3. https://www.palmbeachillustrated.com/norton-museum-of-art-unveils-exhibition-duo/