Norton Launching 'Florida Roots' Series

"Orange and White, Participatory, 1950"
Ralph Coburn (Norton Museum)

(Press Release) West Palm Beach, Florida (July 13, 2026) — Painter Ralph Coburn (American, (1923 – 2018) first developed his talent surrounded by the Art Deco architecture of South Florida, namely Miami Beach, where the artist was raised.
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The Norton Museum of Art will honor that legacy by featuring Coburn as the first artist in its newly launched Florida Roots exhibition series with the exhibition Ralph Coburn: Land, Sea, Sky, open July 25, 2026 – January 3, 2027.

“Nearly a century ago, Ralph Norton recognized that Florida was both a place of great natural beauty as well as a place of cultural possibility,” said Ghislain d’Humières, the Museum’s Kenneth C. Griffin Director and CEO. “This exhibition continues that vision by looking at how South Florida shaped Ralph Coburn’s work — and by reminding us that this region has long played a meaningful role in the creation of art.”

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Throughout his practice, Coburn drew inspiration from his physical surroundings, abstracting, compressing, and distilling landscapes into flat, color-blocked planes. Coburn was not alone in finding a muse in Florida — other artists, like John Singer Sargent, Robert Rauschenberg, Laura Woodward and Jane Peterson, were creatively motivated by the Sunshine State, staying for extended periods or moving there permanently. Woodward’s paintings lured Standard Oil and railroad magnate Henry Flagler to move south from St. Augustine to Palm Beach more than 130 years ago, leading to the transformation of South Florida from wilderness to the cultural and financial hub we know today.

As with Coburn, other artists, ranging from Purvis Young and Hernan Bas to Teresita Fernandéz and the Florida Highwaymen artist Alfred Hair, came of age here. With West Palm Beach’s rising national and international profile, it’s a reminder that Florida, and Palm Beach County in particular, also have been a draw for artists for more than a century.

The Florida Roots exhibition series connects the stimulating setting of Florida — with all its defining characteristics, such as intense weather systems, idiosyncratic ideologies, and diverse cultures — to the bucolic landscapes and beachy atmospheres, and to the creative individuals who have been influenced by this distinct state. Through the exhibition series, the Norton will address the potency of Florida on the artistic experience and its greater role as a center for cultural production within the United States.

Coburn, born in Minnesota, spent many of his formative years in Miami Beach and returned frequently throughout his long life. The exhibition’s title, Land, Sea, Sky, references the trisected artworks that evoke the shorelines, oceans, and horizons of Coburn’s travels between South Florida, Boston, New York, and Paris.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Coburn befriended conceptual artists Ellsworth Kelly, Jean Arp, and John Cage, and he developed a radical approach to artmaking that redefined the relationship between artist and viewer. Called participatory art, his paintings and mixed media works invite the viewer to shift their role from passive observer to active participant.

In Coburn’s practice, participatory art means the artist does not work alone; instead, he would invite others to help either create the work’s composition or determine how it is shown. This conceptual approach put Coburn at the forefront of contemporary responses during the rise of abstraction in the mid-20th century.

In 1957, Coburn, who had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), began a career as a graphic designer in MIT’s Office of Publications, and his art practice took a backseat; his work was kept from view for nearly 60 years. More recently, the artist has slowly begun to gain recognition, first in a 2002 project at Boston University where a few examples of Coburn’s artworks were included in a survey exhibition of Boston artists from the 1940s titled The Visionary Decade.

Over the past two decades, Coburn’s work has been part of several group and solo exhibitions, including The Shape of Abstraction, Boston University Art Gallery, Boston (2010);  Arranged by Choice: The Art of Ralph Coburn, Cape Ann Historical Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts (2012); Ralph Coburn: Random Sequence, The Arts Club of Chicago (2017); Lost, Loose and Loved: Foreign Artists in Paris, 1944 – 1968, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2018); and museum exhibitions in France and New York in 2021 and 2022.

This exhibition, curated by Arden Sherman, the Norton’s former Glenn W. and Cornelia T. Bailey Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, and Danielle Vaknin, Curatorial Research Associate, includes about two dozen paintings and other works, most of which are on loan from private collections. It also features a model that will allow visitors to arrange compositions in the style of participatory art.

Ralph Coburn: Land, Sea, Sky is organized by the Norton Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition was provided by the Dr. Henry and Lois Foster Endowment for the Exhibition of Contemporary Art.