Image: Gertrude Abercrombie (American, 1909–1977), Where or When (Things Past), 1948
The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, is presenting Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery from October 31, 2026, to March 14, 2027. According to the museum, it is the first nationally touring retrospective of the American painter, whose career unfolded largely in Chicago. The show was co-organized by Carnegie Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art, and curated by Eric Crosby and Sarah Humphreville with Cynthia Stucki.
The exhibition began at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where it ran from January 18 to June 1, 2025, before travelling to Colby in Waterville, Maine, from July 12, 2025, to January 11, 2026. It draws on loans from institutional and private collections and is accompanied by a scholarly catalogue of the same title.
Abercrombie was born in Austin, Texas, in 1909 and grew up in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. She took a degree in Romance languages at the University of Illinois in 1929 and worked for the Federal Art Project of the WPA from 1935 to 1940. By the late 1930s she had arrived at her mature style, and she showed in the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibitions and at the Katharine Kuh Gallery. Her Hyde Park home became a gathering place where artists, writers and jazz musicians met for parties and jam sessions. She died in 1977.
Over her career she made several hundred paintings rooted in her own life: self-portraits, interiors, landscapes and still lifes populated by recurring personal symbols and solitary female figures. The museum describes her as drawn to the strangeness of everyday objects, and her inward, dreamlike approach linked her to wider currents in American modernism. The organizers present her as an artist long overlooked because of who she was and how she chose to live and work.
Works listed for the presentation include The Church (1938), Letter from Karl (1940), Self-Portrait, the Striped Blouse (1940), Two Ladders (1947), Where or When (Things Past) (1948), A Picture in a Picture in a Picture (1955), Moored to the Moon (1963) and Demolition Doors (1964). The title comes from her own remark that the whole world is a mystery.
Public programs include an ARTSPEAKS conversation between Zachary Wirsum and Regina Palm on November 13.
