There is a faded photograph of the sculptor Ann Weaver Norton, working in her lush garden in Florida in 1962. Her tiny, barely five-foot frame, dressed in a skirt suit, pearls, and a comical straw hat, is perched atop a 20-foot-high ladder supported by an elaborate wooden scaffold. With a hammer and chisel in her hand, she fine-tunes the face of a giant pink Norwegian granite statue—one of a grouping of monolithic, abstractly ancient-looking creatures Norton referred to as “The Seven Beings.” The snapshot is unusual for many reasons, but most of all because it depicts a woman in the early 1960’s creating a sculpture—an artistic realm that is still largely dominated by men—and because it was taken in the conservative enclave of West Palm Beach, not a place where unusual women did unusual things.
Though Norton was a dedicated working sculptor for over 40 years before her death from leukemia in 1982, her towering works, made of everything from brick and wood to bronze and marble, only began to receive national recognition in the 1970s. Her name finally appears in the Sunday Arts section of the New York Times on March 26, 1978, on the heels of her solo exhibition at the Clocktower, a nonprofit art institution in downtown Manhattan. The author, Grace Glueck, follows Ann through the winding coquina pathways of her two-acre home on the Intracoastal, just off the busy thoroughfare of Flagler Drive, where her imposing sculptures, which she built on site, reveal themselves at every turn. “The powerful brick megaliths, standing 20-feet-high, are hardly what you’d anticipate in the manicured environs of this society playground.” Glueck wrote. “As unexpected as Druidic ruins…[the art] doesn’t fit with the predictably pleasant art displayed in the high-flown galleries that line Worth Avenue in posh Palm Beach, just across the bridge and in the homes of those who winter here.”
Five decades later, Norton’s home and unorthodox sculpture garden still feel wonderfully out of place amidst the increasingly developed and affluent Palm Beach that has risen around it. A nonprofit museum, gallery, educational center, and sanctuary for wildlife since 1977, the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens is still a hidden gem, even among many locals. Nestled unsuspectingly in the historic El Cid neighborhood, the main house where Norton and her husband, the late Chicago steel tycoon and art collector Ralph Hubbard Norton, lived has been transformed into a series of galleries exhibiting Norton’s and other like-minded artists’ work.
The grounds are open to the public and are used as a classroom for visiting students. And Norton’s former studio, a separate cottage near the main house, remains filled with the sketches and mahogany models she made of her colossal sculptures, perfectly preserved as though she had just wandered into her secret garden for a moment.
Norton working on one of her wooden sculpture, circa 1970.
While Norton’s most lasting legacy may be in Florida, the roots of her creativity will always be in Alabama, where she was born in 1905. She lived between her childhood home in Selma and Emerald Place, a former cotton plantation just outside of Montgomery, where her father William Minter Weaver II was born.
The Weavers were considered a founding family of South Alabama, with their hands in everything from railroads and mercantile trade in the 18th century to plantations in the 19th century. But by the late 1800s, it was the women in the family who were making the biggest waves. William’s two aunts were working artists, a true rarity in the South at the time. Rose Weaver was a wood sculptor, and Clara Weaver Parrish was an illustrator and painter. Parrish gained local fame for leaving home to study at The Art Students League in New York City and later for working with Louis Comfort Tiffany, designing stained glass motifs for local churches, among other things. It’s not surprising that Norton began drawing and painting as a toddler, and picked up her first sculpting tool at age eight.
After graduating from high school in Selma, Norton followed in Parrish’s footsteps and headed north, attending Smith College in Massachusetts, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1927 with a degree in religious studies. She returned home to Alabama to save up money in order to eventually move to Manhattan, and during that time wrote and illustrated three children’s books, each about country life at Emerald Place. This earned her a small income, which allowed her to attend the National Academy of Design in New York. In the fall of 1929, just as she arrived in the city, the Great Stock Market Crash hit, sending Wall Street into a downward spiral and the roaring ‘20s to a halt.
During her 13 years in New York, Norton attended the Art Students League, like Parrish, and Cooper Union, rubbing shoulders with the artists and teachers that would shape her work in important ways. The summer after graduating, Norton apprenticed with the Ukrainian avant-garde sculptor Alexander Archipenko, a modernist and early advocate of abstraction and Cubism, values that would eventually be central to Norton’s work. She also won two separate Carnegie Foundation Traveling Fellowships: one to France in 1935 and another to Italy in 1940, where she absorbed the intricately constructed church buttresses, turrets, and other marvels of Romanesque architecture that would inform the scale and structure of the gargantuan sculptures she would soon create in Florida.
Though she was included in group shows at the MoMA and the Whitney, along with numerous gallery shows, Norton was still struggling to make ends meet in New York, living at a hotel in Greenwich Village for $8 a night and subsisting exclusively, for a time, on bananas. Being a female artist in Depression-era America was not easy, and being a “sculptress” (as women sculptors were called then) was even harder, namely because it required expensive materials and labor to practice. So, in 1943, with 50 cents in her pocket and a string holding her suitcase closed, she headed back down South, accepting a position as the first sculpting instructor at what is now known as the Norton Museum and School of Art in West Palm Beach. The Norton Museum—now the largest in Florida with over 8,000 works of contemporary and historical art, sculpture, and photography—had been opened two years prior by Ralph Norton. A patrician midwesterner and card-carrying member of Palm Beach society, he was also an avid art collector—a happy byproduct of his wild financial success at Acme Steel Co., which he transformed into a $55 million business during his tenure as president and chairman of the board. Ralph possessed a particular appreciation for sculpture, and he and Ann almost immediately became friends.
Living in tribal Palm Beach in the early 1940s was isolating for an outsider. “There is nothing here but money and water and a few palm trees,” Norton wrote to a friend the year she arrived, calling the social scene “a snake pit,” which she existed wholly apart from, still broke and barely able to afford a new cotton dress. Though she was teaching regularly at the Norton School, she feverishly continued to create her earthy patinated bronze sculptures, depicting simple moments of everyday life: a subject brushing her hair, a street musician playing the washboard. Only one or two-feet-high at the most, her figures were diminutive in size compared to her later monoliths, but they share a certain otherworldly quality, at once childlike and abstract.
After the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1947, Ralph asked Ann to marry him. Worried that the social swirl of the Bath and Tennis and Everglades clubs would distract her from her calling, Ann almost turned Ralph down, writing to him in a letter that she “couldn’t do society.” But, at 43 years old, Ann married Ralph, then 73, in Chicago. Soon after, the couple moved full-time to Ralph’s house in West Palm Beach, a magical respite that would be Ann’s home for the rest of her life. The house was designed by the American architect Marion Sims Wyeth, famous for building Gilded Age mansions such as Doris Duke’s estate in Hawaii, Shangri-La, and Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach. Wyeth imagined the Nortons’ home with wrought-iron balconies and a gracious New Orleans–style porch in the Monterey Revival style popular in Palm Beach at the time. As a wedding gift to Ann, Ralph asked Wyeth to design an artist studio. Sadly, after only five years together, her husband died suddenly in 1953.
Norton immersed herself in her art as never before, embarking on a transformative journey to the American West the following year, exploring the Grand Canyon in Arizona and the rock formations in Utah’s Monument Valley and Bryce Canyon National Park. The natural wonders she visited inspired a memorial for Ralph: “The Seven Beings,” the series of stone sentinels Norton was photographed with, in her sun hat and pearls, in 1963. The 12-foot-high piece, which resembles supersized Mayan artifacts, still stands in the garden today, framed by deep green palms. The outsized tribute to her late husband was Norton’s first step in realizing her dream of redefining what garden sculpture could be. It was also the last figurative work she would ever create, as she spent the remaining years of her life primarily focused on conceiving nine brick monoliths that would reside alongside it in her urban jungle. Executed by Norton, and her dedicated construction team, so long as her health permitted, these colossal monuments, some standing 20 feet high or 47 feet long, are a culmination of her life experiences, from the medieval cathedral archways she saw on her European travels as a young fellow to the red sandstone mountains of the West she discovered as a widow.
After Norton was diagnosed with leukemia in 1977, she turned her focus to the protection and preservation of her property, incorporating it as a nonprofit foundation. She invited her friend, Sir Peter Smithers, the late British gardener, parliamentarian, intelligence officer, and rumored inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond, to help her reimagine the landscape as a dramatic backdrop for her mysterious abstractions. “The design must be such that dense luxuriant foliage would conceal and then at the turn of the path suddenly reveal each sculpture,” said Smithers in his 1995 memoir Adventures of a Gardener. “One would come upon each of them by surprise…a first meeting with each one must be an event, almost a shock.”
Today, the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens are home to over 250 rare species of palms, cycads, and a pollinator garden that is not only a tribute to Norton, but a realization of her vision for school children of all backgrounds to come and learn about the connection between nature and art in the shade of her beautiful arboretum. Over the past four years, the museum has undergone a restoration project that will conclude this year, with the repurposing of a garage to house an indoor programming space and permanent gallery for Norton’s letters, photographs, and the works on paper, including the watercolor, charcoal, and pastel sketches that served as the starting point for her three-dimensional sculptures. “We want the public to have a tangible way to interact with Ann’s process,” says Frances Fisher, founding chair of the board of trustees at ANSG, which now includes local art luminaries such as Jeff Koons and Iris Apfel. Fisher recalls hearing of the Weaver women growing up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, near Selma. “She was talked about as an incredibly independent woman going to study in New York during the Depression.” she says. “Ann lived at a time when women simply did not go to college and practice art professionally—they got married. She is an inspirational figure for women of the South, and that’s another legacy she has left us.”
To that end, the ANSG welcomes a rotating roster of emerging female sculptors to showcase their work in the museum’s garden and galleries. This December, it will host The Divine Feminine: Contemporary Women Sculptors, an exhibition curated by Allison Raddock, a private art advisor in Palm Beach and New York, and Sarah Gavlak, founder of New Wave, an artist residency program and exhibition concept in Palm Beach and Los Angeles. The show will feature works by Judy Chicago, Ruth Duckworth, Beverly Pepper, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Kiki Smith, among others. “I wanted to put Ann Norton in the context of other female artists who are more well-known, because she should be, too,” says Gavlak, who focuses on emerging female artists of color and in the LBGTQIA+ community. “Many women artists had to wait until their 70s or 80s—or until they were dead—to experience success, and that’s because the art market has traditionally not wanted to give equity to women, especially women sculptors.”
Indeed, Norton received her first public commission in 1978, just four years before she died. It was from the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, to create a sculpture in front of the new Harvard Square subway station in Cambridge near Harvard Yard. The 20-foot obelisk, entitled “Gateway to Knowledge,” consists of two pillars built from handmade Mexican brick, with a narrow slit between them. The work still stands, and recently, a smaller sculpture garden with pieces by other artists was installed around it. It is a concrete reminder of how Norton’s presence—and prominence—as an artist is still growing, even after she is gone. Or, as Norton herself put it in her interview with the New York Times in 1978: “I’m just emerging,” she said. “Like the tip of an iceberg.”