South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
READY FOR ITS CLOSE-UP
Dramatic new Norton Museum of Art to reopen
Artist Pei White’s cotton tapestry “Eikón” is a mashup of nature and design, stretching 40 feet across and towering high inside the Great Hall at the new Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Take a deeper look at White’s tapestry – a close-up of gray, crinkled, reflective mylar – and you notice a hint of green: It’s a reflection of the 80-year-old banyan tree looming just outside the Great Hall.
White’s tapestry is just one of many new features at the museum on South Dixie Highway that add up to a dramatic transformation.
The Norton, which closed last July to finish three years of renovations, will re-open to the public on Feb. 9 with eight new exhibitions and a $100 million face-lift, adding 12,000 square feet of gallery space, along with new classrooms, a restaurant, a sculpture garden and a 210-seat auditorium.
Hope Alswang, the Norton’s executive director, admits the makeover wasn’t easy. Speaking on Friday during an early-peek media tour of the new museum, Alswang told the roomful of architects, journalists and donors that,
“If we were a car, we would’ve been a 12-year-old Volkswagen. And someone handed us a Lamborghini.” Hope Alswang, Norton’s executive director
sometimes, the wait felt endless.
“If we were a car, we would’ve been a 12-year-old Volkswagen,” Alswang says. “And someone handed us a Lamborghini.”
That “someone” is Lord Norman Foster, the star architect whose firm, Foster and Partners (London’s Wembley Stadium and New York’s soaring Hearst Tower), steered the museum’s giant makeover.
Here’s what we saw during the sneak preview at the upgraded Norton Museum of Art.
Entrance and Great Hall
First off, the Norton Museum’s grand entrance plaza no longer faces the south, but South Dixie Highway to the west, with parking now relocated across the street south of Woodlawn Cemetery.
A 40-foot-long Foster-designed concrete bench in the entrance plaza frames a serene, inch-deep reflecting pool. The centerpiece of the pool is Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, a 19-ton sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, which depicts a wheel-shaped typewriter eraser – an obsolete piece of technology.
A 43-foot-tall canopy made of polished, reflective aluminum panels hangs over the plaza. A half-circle cutout in the canopy accommodates a 65-foot-tall banyan tree, which is so close it brushes against the building.
Inside the 3,600-square-foot Great Hall, a tall room just off the main atrium, there is a grand piano, book carts, a coffee bar and mod-style lounge seating with massive wooden floor lamps.
Sculpture garden
The wide windows of a
150-foot-long indoor sculpture gallery offers eye-popping views of the museum’s outdoor sculpture garden. Nearly an acre in size, the garden itself includes a
9,000-square-foot event lawn, with outdoor sculptures perched along the edge of the property. Noteworthy is Antony Gormley’s Total Strangers, a collection of cast-iron, life-size human figures standing on the lawn.
“It used to be our south parking lot, which is insane,” says Cheryl Brutvan, the museum’s contemporary-art curator. “The garden is easily our most impressive addition.”
Original 1941 galleries
Crucial to the Norton’s redesign was preserving the museum’s squat, original east wing, built in 1941 when the museum first opened to the public. David Summerfield, senior executive planner for Foster and Partners, says that when his team ripped up the carpeting in the east wing, it exposed the gallery’s original oak hardwood.
“We weren’t dealing with a blank sheet of paper here,” Summerfield says. “When we ripped the old ceilings down and tore up the original carpeting, we saw the skeleton of the building, and we knew we had to weave new design into the original structures seamlessly.”
Now in the east wing are new paintings and sculptures from contemporary artists such as Kara Walker and Ed Ruscha, Damien Hirst and Anselm Keifer. In two new European galleries, there are masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Claude Monet.
New spaces
The museum’s new 210-seat auditorium, Brutvan says, will be used to host lectures, films and concerts. Its walls are blanketed in wooden panels pockmarked with hundreds of small holes – design elements that improve From top: In a downstairs gallery, guests check out the new exhibit “Nina Chanel Abney: Neon,” one of eight exhibitions opening Feb. 9.
Damien Hirst’s “Untitled,” a 2007 painting with butterfies on canvas.
Pae White’s tapestry “Eikón” stretches across the Great Hall. the room’s acoustics, she says.
Meanwhile, a winding gray staircase leading to the museum’s second and third floors is decorated with a new installation. “I Remember Ceramic Castles, Mermaids and Japanese Bridges,” from artist Rob Wynne, depicts a whimsical medley of poured and mirrored glass that spells out the artwork’s title.
Upstairs, the museum’s growing Chinese permanent collection includes 430 objects spanning five new galleries and a period of 5,000 years. Other galleries devoted to photography feature the new exhibit “Out of the Box: Camera-less Photography,” a collection of photographlike images made without cameras.
“Hope [Alswang] has kind of let me run wild, letting me beef up the collection,” says Tim Wride, the museum’s photography curator. Now, he says, there’s enough upstairs gallery space that “we can show the whole history of photography and fit a big chunk of it on our walls.”
Restaurant
Opening with the museum on Feb. 9 will be Restaurant at the Norton, a 165-seat fine-dining eatery with terrace seating, private dining rooms and a nearby multipurpose room with Florida-inspired gold-leaf wallpaper.
The menu (prices range from $12 to $28) features modern American fare from chef David Schiraldo, and includes seafood small plates, such as ahi tuna tartare and red snapper crudo, and sandwiches such as the halfpound Norton Burger with Norfolk sauce and cheddar cheese on a brioche bun. Entrees include miso-glazed salmon and chicken paillard with organic chicken breast, shaved vegetable salad and champagne vinaigrette.
If you go
The Norton Museum of Art,
1450 S. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach, will be open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Fridays. The museum is closed Wednesdays. Admission costs $5-$18, but entry is free on Fridays and Saturdays. Call 561-832-5196 or go to Norton.org.
The Norton’s restaurant hours are 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday and 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays. It’s closed on Wednesdays, and the restaurant will begin accepting reservations on Feb. 11. Call
561-268-0500.
The Norton’s free Art After Dark program, resuming Feb. 15, has been moved from Thursdays to 5-10 p.m. Fridays.
Noteworthy exhibitions include “Nina Chanel Abney: Neon,” (Feb. 9-June 25), a collection of boldly colored paintings from the New York-based artist that tackle racial inequality and discrimination. Others include “Out of the Box: Camera-less Photography,” which revisits William Henry Fox Talbot’s 19thcentury “photogenic drawings” and Man Ray’s surrealistic “rayograms”; and “Good Fortune to All,” a collection of rare paintings that capture a Chinese Lantern Festival from the late 16th century.