West Palm Beach gets two of the most interesting museum shows of the season this weekend. On October 31, the Norton Museum of Art opens Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery and Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb. One is a painter of quiet, dreamlike rooms. The other is a photographer of hard California light. Both run until March 14, 2027.
Gertrude Abercrombie
Abercrombie lived from 1909 to 1977 and was, in the Norton's words, a critical figure in the mid-20th-century Chicago art and jazz scenes. She made hundreds of paintings full of autobiography, putting herself into self-portraits, landscapes, interiors and still lifes through personal symbols and mysterious women. She liked to say she painted simple things that are a little strange, and that is the best way into her work.
Look at the image at the top of this page. A woman in a coral dress stands in a grey room holding a string, with doors behind her, a small table, a horn and a cat. Nothing is happening, yet everything feels loaded. That is Abercrombie's gift. Her rooms look calm and orderly, then the details start to feel like clues to a story she never quite tells.
The museum describes this retrospective as the first nationally touring presentation of her art, and it is co-organized by Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art. The works listed include The Church from 1938, Two Ladders from 1947, The Courtship from 1949, A Picture in a Picture in a Picture from 1955 and Moored to the Moon from 1963. Titles like those tell you a lot about her sense of humour and her love of the uncanny.
The show also makes a point about who gets remembered. The Norton says she was historically marginalized because of who she was and how she lived and worked, and that she lived in defiance of the social norms of her era. Seeing this much of her work in one place is a chance to put her back where she belongs in American modernism.
Mimi Plumb
In the second show, the mood changes. Mimi Plumb, born in 1953, has photographed the human-altered landscape of the American West for five decades, working in and around San Francisco. Blazing Light is her first museum exhibition, organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and it brings together her three most important bodies of work.
The White Sky comes from the 1970s, when she began photographing as a teenager during a time of fast land development and Cold War worry. Landfall and The Golden City follow, and The Reservoir, made from 2021 to 2025, pictures a stark world that feels like the morning after some undefined disaster. Across all of it she uses gritty black and white to render the intense California sun, so the light itself becomes a source of tension. If you shoot black and white yourself, this is a masterclass in how harsh light can carry feeling.
Plan your visit
The Norton is at 1450 S. Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach. Check the museum site for hours and tickets before you go. If you are planning a return trip, the upcoming exhibitions page lists Prix Pictet: Storm, opening December 5.
Why it matters
This one is Surfacing. Two artists who spent their careers slightly outside the spotlight are getting serious attention at the same time, under one roof, and the pairing works. Abercrombie looks inward and Plumb looks out at the land, yet both find the strange in the ordinary. For more overdue museum moments, read about Charley Harper's first museum retrospective and John Divola's Sheila, another photographer revisiting a long career.
