Ralph Coburn: Land, Sea, Sky — Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, through 3 January 2027

Ralph Coburn (1923–2018) was born in Minneapolis, but it was Miami Beach that made him a painter. He spent his formative years there, and the city’s Art Deco character — the flat planes, the clean colour, the horizon always in view — set the direction his work would take. In the 1940s and 1950s he worked alongside Ellsworth Kelly, Jean Arp and John Cage, and was among the pioneers of participatory art, works that ask the viewer to move from passive observer to active participant.

Land, Sea, Sky at the Norton Museum of Art gathers his abstractions around the three bands of a coastal view. The titles refer to shorelines and horizons from his movements between South Florida, Boston, New York and Paris; the method was to abstract, compress and distil landscape into flat, colour-blocked planes. It is the first exhibition in the Norton’s new Florida Roots series, which looks at how the state’s weather, its ideologies and its mixed cultures have shaped the artists who passed through it.

The exhibition is supported by the Dr. Henry and Lois Foster Endowment for the Exhibition of Contemporary Art.

Practical details

• Dates: on view through 3 January 2027
• Where: Norton Museum of Art, 1450 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, FL 33401, United States
• Organised by: Norton Museum of Art, first exhibition of the Florida Roots series
• Admission: see the museum’s website

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition for readers who follow the Art Deco district of Miami Beach and what it did to the artists who grew up inside it. Coburn’s planes of colour are that architecture seen from the beach.