Flush With Donations and Art, West Palm’s Norton Museum Proposes Upgrade

Just seven years after it completed a major makeover, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., is ready to expand again.

In January, the West Palm Beach Planning Board approved an expansion plan that would add about 100,000 square feet to the Norton’s 8.5-acre campus at 1450 South Dixie Highway. 

Just 37 percent of the museum’s collection — including pieces by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and Constantin Brancusi — is on display, and the expansion would allow the Norton to display more of the works donors have given in recent years, museum CEO Ghislain d’Humières told the West Palm Beach Planning Board in January. The West Palm Beach City Commission will consider the Foster + Partners-designed proposal.

“The collection is getting unbelievable,” d’Humières said.

Harvey Oyer, a land use attorney representing the Norton Museum of Art, said the cost of the proposed expansion is $200 million. A museum spokesperson told Commercial Observer that the Norton is still working on details around the project’s budget and fundraising.

In February 2019, the Norton unveiled the Kenneth C. Griffin Building, which included 12,000 square feet of new galleries, expanded classrooms, a 210-seat auditorium and a new store and restaurant.

Since then, the museum has been inundated with donations of money and art, d’Humières and Oyer said. The Norton’s most recent tax return shows assets of $276.5 million and liabilities of just $16.3 million, for net assets of $260.2 million as of September 2024.

“The post-COVID wealth migration to our community occurred, and we are now bursting at the seams with people, donors willing to pay for it, donors willing to give their art to our local art museum,” Oyer told the planning board. “We’re very blessed to have this problem.”

Jeff Ostrowski can be reached at jostrowski@commercialobserver.com.