An Anniversary Logo to Celebrate

For many people around the world, awareness of the Norton Simon Museum stems from one event: the Rose Parade. Every year on TV, the Museum’s building, with its distinctive curved, tile-clad walls and circular turrets crowning its expansive roofline, serves as the backdrop to dozens of festive floats, marching bands and dignitaries.

Those architectural characteristics take center stage in the Museum’s 50th-anniversary logo, which will appear on printed materials, our website, advertisements and special items for sale in the Museum Store. Designed by the Museum’s senior graphic designer, Jennifer Johnson, the logo contains a small portion of a painting of the building created by architect John Kelsey (1925–2012). Along with his business partner Thornton Ladd, Kelsey designed the Museum’s building in the 1960s for the Pasadena Art Museum.

In a twist of fate, we learned of the painting (and three others) when Jennifer Kelsey contacted the Museum in early 2024. She had recently become the steward of her father’s flat-file storage, which, among many items, contained four paintings of the Museum’s front entrance. According to Jennifer, her father created the works in the early 1990s at his home studio in Montecito, using an archival photograph of the building (she suspects by Wayne Thom) as a starting point, and water-based acrylic paint on Arches aquarelle paper. The detail included in the logo is from the most naturalistic of the four paintings—the other three have a striking midcentury modern style, done in variations of colors. John Kelsey was still working as an architect when he created the works (by then he was focused on residential projects), but he engaged in art making as a creative outlet.

Jennifer Kelsey has graciously allowed the Museum to use the detail of her father’s painting in its logo, as well as licensed all four paintings for use on specialty items for sale in the Store, which will become available in the months ahead. As we celebrate this milestone year, the logo marks another major endeavor—our Exterior Improvement Project, which aims to transform our exterior spaces, including restoration and repair of the building’s unique facade.

—Leslie Denk, Vice President of External Affairs
This article first appeared in the Museum’s Winter 2025 Newsletter.