WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.- The Norton Museum of Art’s main summer exhibition, Going Places: Transportation Designs from the Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Collection, focuses on the art of transportation design during the mid-20th century, and is on view June 25, 2015 through Jan. 10, 2016. For decades, Mr. Sharf has been fascinated by how the pace of life accelerated in the middle decades of the 20th century. Via model planes, trains, and, most of all, automobiles, he looked to capture the excitement of getting from one place to another. (He and his wife, Jean, are part-time Palm Beach residents.)

Featuring more than 200 objects, including design drawings, concept sketches, renderings, advertising art, and posters, as well as models of trains, planes, and automobiles, the exhibition literally examines how we got here. It also highlights the designers who created the look of the 20th-century vehicles that transported us and transformed the way we travel. The exhibition, which is augmented with related period newsreels, TV ads, and clips from classic films and television programs, includes objects from two previous exhibitions, Planes, Trains , and Automobiles, and The Great Age of the American Automobile, organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Wilmington Trust is the exhibition corporate sponsor.

Guest Curator Matthew Bird, a professor of Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design who organized last summer’s Wheels and Heels exhibition at the Norton, organized Going Places.

Of the Sharfs’ collection, Bird says, “The models are incredibly detailed. The concept sketches present radical new realities. The renderings show, in an amazingly vivid realistic way, what a design will look like long before it actually exists, and, the amount of communicating the objects do, about location, aspiration, technology, who we were, who we thought we could become, is amazing.”

Bird adds that, “Going Places is the story of how engineering and design ingenuity created the transportation options we so take for granted today, and how artists and designers developed amazing tools -- wind-tunnel test models, cut-away models, detailed renderings -- to communicate these advances while inventing new vehicles.”