At the Norton, a surrealist’s dream diary meets California’s uneasy landscapes

The contrast is the point

On Oct. 31, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach opened two solo exhibitions that place a surrealist’s private dream-world beside a photographer’s record of a changing American landscape. “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery” and “Blazing Light: Photographs by Mimi Plumb” run through March 14, 2027. Local coverage describes the concurrent shows as a dialogue between an inward and outward gaze.palmbeachillustrated

Abercrombie’s exhibition brings together more than five dozen paintings; Plumb’s spans photographs made across five decades. One artist built autobiographical, dreamlike scenes; the other worked in black and white among real California streets, suburbs and landscapes. The connection is not a shared style but a shared interest in how places hold emotional tension.palmbeachillustrated +1

A private mythology in Chicago

At midcentury, Abercrombie was a leading figure in Chicago’s Hyde Park arts scene. The Art Institute of Chicago describes paintings built from stark interiors, illusory landscapes and complex self-portraits; she made surrealism personal by folding recognizable objects into dreamlike spaces.artic

Her art life also reached beyond the canvas. Smithsonian archives describe Abercrombie hosting artists, literary figures and jazz musicians at gatherings in Chicago, placing her work within the city’s broader cultural history.si The Norton presentation is part of a nationally touring retrospective co-organized by Carnegie Museum of Art and Colby College Museum of Art. The Milwaukee Art Museum calls it the most comprehensive presentation of her work organized to date.mam The tour brings a Chicago-centered artist to a wider institutional audience.mam

Plumb makes the West feel unsettled

Plumb has photographed human-altered landscapes in California and the American West for five decades. The High Museum of Art organized “Blazing Light” as her first museum exhibition, bringing together major bodies of work spanning 1972 to 2025.high The series move from Bay Area suburbia and urban scenes toward recent photographs of altered landscapes; the High describes environmental change among the anxieties threaded through them.high

The juxtaposition at the Norton does not suggest that Plumb and Abercrombie shared a movement or influenced one another. Instead, it invites visitors to compare how each turns ordinary surroundings psychologically charged: Abercrombie through personal symbols and imagined settingsartic, and Plumb through the traces of development and environmental change.high Norton curator Lauren Richman told Palm Beach Illustrated that the artists share “a sense of beauty and unease.” A closer-look program on Abercrombie is scheduled for Nov. 11.palmbeachillustrated