Hope Alswang, 77, Who Transformed Florida’s Largest Art Museum, Dies

Hope Alswang, a veteran arts administrator who oversaw a major transformation of the Norton Museum of Art, the largest art museum in Florida and the last of four she ran, died on June 11 in hospice care in Providence, R.I. She was 77.

Her husband, Henry Joyce, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Ms. Alswang was the president and chief executive of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont in 2004 when she first visited the Norton, in West Palm Beach.

“I remember it was a fantastic collection, and I thought at the time it was a lot less museum than they deserved,” she told Florida Weekly in 2018. She added: “By 2004, you would think, ‘What are the aspirations of this place?’ I would think, ‘They don’t have their sights right.’”

More than a decade later, she got her chance to influence the future of Norton when she became its executive director and chief executive and worked with the British architect Norman Foster and his firm, Foster + Partners, on a $107 million expansion.

When it was completed in 2019, it featured a new building that added 12,000 square feet of gallery space; a sculpture garden, with works by artists like Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer, built on a former parking lot; a new auditorium; more classrooms; a new front entrance that can be seen from the heavily traveled South Dixie Highway, and six renovated cottages to house an artist-in-residence program.