Image: Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach
The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, is presenting ‘Art & Independence: America at 250,’ an intimate installation marking America’s 250th anniversary. The exhibition brings together works in painting, sculpture, ceramics, and photography and remains on view through December 6, 2026.
According to the museum, the presentation connects different eras and artistic media to consider the heritage and future of the American spirit. Rather than focusing on a single period or medium, it places works from across the Norton’s holdings in conversation around the ways art can document, shape, and inspire a nation.
The installation includes James Chapin’s ‘Ruby Green Singing’ (1928), a painting by the American artist James Chapin (1887–1975). It also features Gordon Parks’s ‘Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman (American Gothic),’ made in 1942 and printed later. Parks’s photograph is shown alongside more recent work, including Hank Willis Thomas’s ‘Opportunity’ (2015).
The selection extends beyond works made in the United States. A ‘Monteith’ dating to around 1700, from China’s Qing dynasty during the Kangxi reign, is among the objects listed by the museum. Its inclusion places American art and national identity within a broader institutional presentation spanning multiple artistic traditions and historical contexts.
The exhibition’s range of media is central to its structure. Painting, photography, sculpture, and ceramics offer distinct ways of recording experience and expressing ideas about culture, identity, history, and belonging. The museum describes the installation as a space for contemplation, using the relationship between works from different eras to examine both inherited ideas of independence and their continuing implications.
‘Art & Independence: America at 250’ is one of several exhibitions listed in the Norton’s September 2026 programming. Other exhibitions on view at the West Palm Beach museum include ‘Cursed Images: Pictures Out of Context,’ drawn from the Peter J. Cohen Collection; ‘Ralph Coburn: Land, Sea, Sky’; and the collection exhibition ‘Visible Fictions: Photography and Artifice.’ The Norton is located at 1450 S. Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, and ‘Art & Independence: America at 250’ continues through December 6, 2026.
