Nora Maité Nieves is the Norton’s 2023-24 Mary Lucille Dauray Artist in Residence. In conjunction with her residency, Nieves will present an exhibition of her work including artworks she will create during her residency. Drawing inspiration from architecture encountered in both Puerto Rico and New York City, Nieves’ practice acts as a connector between worlds, combining fragments of decorative elements from her Caribbean roots, such as a ubiquitous modernist concrete block design, or a tile floor pattern from her childhood home, with those from the urban landscape she encounters daily. Exploring these themes of identity and belonging, Nieves comments on the sacredness of a single place within a complicated and evolving environment. This exhibition also features a single-channel video work that mixes abstracted visual motifs found in her paintings and sculptures.

Organized by the Norton Museum of Art. Support for this exhibition was provided by the Milton and Sheila Fine Endowment for Contemporary Art and the Dr. Henry and Lois Foster Endowment for the Exhibition of Contemporary Art.

The Mary Lucille Dauray Artist in Residence program was made possible by the generosity of the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund/MLDauray Arts Initiative.

For over six decades, Ellen Graham has photographed actors, musicians, models, athletes, and royals at their most vulnerable: unplanned, unposed, and unscripted. Imbuing a sense of immediacy, showing moments of intimacy and humor, and celebrating her remarkable ability to disarm her subjects, Graham’s photographs provide unique insight into a person’s inner dimensions. This exhibition highlights several of Graham’s gifts to the Norton along with a generous array of special loans — both photographs and photographic ephemera — from the Ellen Graham Archive.

Organized by the Norton Museum of Art.

This is the ninth exhibition of RAW — Recognition of Art by Women.

Major support was provided by the Leonard and Sophie Davis Fund/MLDauray Arts Initiative. Additional support was provided by the Cornelia T. Bailey Foundation, the Hartfield Foundation, Morgan Stanley, and the Diane Belfer Endowment for Sculpture. Support for the accompanying publication was made possible by the generosity of the Girlfriend Fund.

The exhibition’s title refers both to performative magic and to the “magical thinking” in today’s culture rife wi disinformation, conspiracy theories, and “alternative facts.” In essence, the theme of the show is lying, whether it’s stage magic where the audience is in on the deception or hoaxes perpetrated for financial or political gain. The show includes artists who are inspired by stage magic or creators of deep fakes that, when exposed, reveal a greater truth.

The inspiration for the exhibition is the life and career of the late Amazing Randi, a Florida resident and legendary stage magician who was a relentless debunker of charlatans. Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.), an artist who has exhibited at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, was Randi’s lifelong partner. He began his career as a performance artist in the 1980s when the two collaborated on an international project exposing spirit channelers.

This exhibition is especially timely. There are parallels between our day and the early 20th century with its deadly flu and world war that spawned an epidemic of fake mediums as well as the golden age of stage magic. The trauma of our own pandemic, climate disasters, and rampant violence have seen an explosive increase in supernatural characters in popular culture as well as dangerous hoaxes that have proved difficult to discredit.

Curated by Senior Curator Kathleen Goncharov

Rose B. Simpson is an artist, a mother, and the daughter of a matrilineal line of ceramicists and potters spanning nearly 70 generations. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the last decade of Rose B. Simpson’s artistic career. The show positions Simpson’s work in the greater context of family and womanhood, exploring the relationships between the artist and her maternal relatives and their influences on her work. A member of the Santa Clara Pueblo (Tewa: Kha-'Po Owingeh) in New Mexico, Simpson combines her ancestral and contemporary knowledge to create mixed media sculptures using clay, organic found items, and mechanical hardware.

Featured alongside Simpson's work will be sculptures by her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, a prolific artist whose expressive figures inspired Simpson; her grandmother, Rina Swentzell, who was a well-known academic, activist, and architect; and her great-grandmother, the artist Rose Naranjo, who was the center of gravity that connected Simpson’s many talented and successful relatives.

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923) is a name unfamiliar to most American museum visitors even though he was hailed as a "master of light" by no less an artist than Claude Monet. Revered in Spain as that nation's last great traditional painter, Sorolla was the epitome of a successful artist. A talented student, by 1900 he had become one of Europe's leading artists. Though he lived in Madrid, he returned often to his native Valencia, a town on the southeast coast where he painted beach scenes that allowed him to focus on the study of light. There he was struck by the daily sight of fishermen maneuvering teams of oxen to beach their boats at end of day -- a scene captured in this monumental canvas of 1903. This heroic image of daily labor shows Sorolla recording the fall of light with extraordinary precision while simultaneously employing Impressionism's unmixed colors and freer brushwork. Overall, it is an image that demonstrates the artist's equal allegiance to the Spanish tradition of realism and to the advanced art of his own day. Beaching the Boat (Afternoon Light), is on loan from the Hispanic Society of America for two years, is presented in dialogue with two works by Sorolla from the Norton’s collection, Child on a Beach and Portrait of Enrique Recio y Gil.

Special Guests
This series highlights exceptional works of art on long-term loan from public and private collections. The exhibition is made possible, in part, through the generosity of an anonymous donor. Sorolla's painting will remain on view for two years.

Jacobus Vrel (active 1654 –1662) may be the most enigmatic artist of The Dutch Golden Age. For nearly three centuries his work was confused with that of Johannes Vermeer (Dutch, 1632 –1675), whose work he prefigures in various ways. Yet almost nothing is known about his beginnings and career. How art historians have been able to identify this forerunner of Vermeer is one of the most intriguing episodes in recent Dutch art-historical scholarship. This installation features a single work by Vrel, Interior with a Sick Woman by a Fireplace, in which visitors will experience a superb example of an interior domestic scene not yet represented in the Norton’s Collection. As a part of the Norton’s Special Guests series, this work will be displayed with the Museum's other Dutch paintings for two years.

Organized by the Norton Museum of Art.