In Pasadena, time feels especially textured, incredibly tangible—something you can touch, something that hums beneath the quiet geometry of trees and meticulously placed tile. This year, the Norton Simon Museum invites us to reach out and feel it. The institution, a Southern California cornerstone since its 1975 renaming, celebrates its 50th anniversary not only by looking back at what it has collected, but by reflecting on what endures—craft, beauty, gold, and the stillness between centuries of making.

The celebration unfolds through a constellation of exhibitions, beginning with Gold: Enduring Power, Sacred Craft (October 24, 2025 – February 16, 2026), a sweeping meditation on the luminous metal that has animated devotion, art, and desire across civilizations. Curated by Maggie Bell and Lakshika Senarath Gamage, the show gathers around sixty works, from a 13th-century gilt bronze Indra to modern European ornamentations, tracing how gold survives translation—between cultures, between faith and form.

Running in tandem is Retrospective: 50 Years at the Norton Simon Museum, a visual autobiography chronicling the institution’s physical and philosophical evolution. The exhibition pairs archival photographs with a timeline of acquisitions and exhibitions, sketching the Museum’s transformation from private vision to public legacy. A new addition to the collection—a bronze Arabesque by Edgar Degas—joins the story, an emblem of timeless movement reintroduced on the eve of commemoration.

The Museum will open its doors freely to the public for 50 Years: A Golden Anniversary Weekend Celebration (November 7–9, 2025), offering live music, art-making, and a rare intimacy with its spaces, newly renewed through a comprehensive exterior improvement project. The restored Heath tile façade and refreshed Sculpture Garden stand as quiet tributes to endurance and care.

Accompanying it all is Recollections: Stories from the Norton Simon Museum, a new publication gathering essays that breathe life into the collection’s history—intimate, idiosyncratic, human. Because ultimately, the museum’s brilliance lies not only in what hangs on its walls, but in its dialogue with time itself. Fifty years on, the Norton Simon remains a living archive of the sacred and the everyday—a place where art and memory glimmer in equal measure