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<\/p>\nFew people have done more to shape Los Angeles\u2019 art scene than Eileen Harris Norton.<\/p>\n
The third-generation Californian, born and raised near Watts Towers in South Los Angeles, bought her first artwork at the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, co-founded Art + Practice in Leimert Park, and has spent 50 years collecting artists who were, in many cases, her friends and neighbors. She also became a major force behind a generation of museum curators who have systematically changed who and how institutions across the country collect.<\/p>\n
The city now has an opportunity to engage with her legacy through an exhibition, \u201cDestiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection,\u201d at Hauser & Wirth in downtown L.A. through August.<\/p>\n
Featuring more than 80 works \u2014 many of which hung in her home until recently \u2014 the show offers rare insight into a renowned collector whose acquisitions are marked by sustained support for women artists, artists of color and Southern California-based artists, and a belief in art as an engine for education and social change.<\/p>\n
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Eileen Harris Norton grew up near the Watts Towers with a mother who took her to plenty of arts and culture events. She later became one of the most influential collectors in the city.<\/p>\n
(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
During a recent interview that began in the leafy courtyard of the gallery, Harris Norton shared the story of her collection, revealing the personal depth of her connection to the art and artists in the process. It\u2019s a material history of a culture: one Harris Norton didn\u2019t just witness or document, but actively built.<\/p>\n
The notoriously private collector is lively and disarmingly funny. She noted that her kids call the celebrated abstract painter Mark Bradford \u201cUncle Bradford,\u201d and that when she first met him, he was \u201cliving in this hole and creating these beautiful pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she addresses the discrimination she encountered in the art world, she doesn\u2019t name the racial overtones. She pitches her voice higher, widens her eyes, and lets the imitation convey her meaning. \u201cNow everyone says, \u2018Oh, Eileen, I wish I had a Mark Bradford,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cAnd let me tell you, they had their chance to buy a Mark Bradford 20 years ago, and they were like, \u2018Meh, I don\u2019t know.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Several visitors stop by to congratulate Harris Norton on the show. A curator from the Brooklyn Museum tells her that a Kara Walker pop-up artist\u2019s book, one of many works Harris Norton has gifted to the institution, will appear in an upcoming show.<\/p>\n
For decades, the dominant account of L.A. art centered on Ed Ruscha\u2019s deadpan photographs, David Hockney\u2019s shimmering pools and the perceptual experiments of the Light and Space artists. What Harris Norton\u2019s collection makes clear is how much that story left out. It is Womanhouse and Judy Chicago. It is the Watts rebellion and Noah Purifoy. It is the Chicano printmakers in East Los Angeles and the Black artists of Leimert Park. Not separate movements, but a continuous conversation between artists responding to similar environmental and social conditions that the institutions tasked with paying attention largely failed to take into account.<\/p>\n
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Lorraine O\u2019Grady\u2019s \u201cMlle Bourgeoise Noire\u201d (1980-83), a gown made from 180 pairs of white dinner gloves \u2014 worn during performances critiquing the exclusion of Black artists from the mainstream art world unless they made work that conformed to white expectations, or what she called \u201cart with white gloves on.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody was going to New York and buying whoever was popular,\u201d Harris Norton recalled. \u201cThen they\u2019d come to our house and go, who is that?\u201d<\/p>\n
There was no dearth of viewing material in Harris Norton\u2019s house. A photograph by Uta Barth, \u201cDeep Blue Day\u201d (2012), which usually hangs in Harris Norton\u2019s bedroom, is on the far wall of the first gallery. A portrait of Harris Norton by Don Bachardy hangs nearby, as does a photograph of Harris Norton\u2019s son Michael beneath an arbor by Kwaku Alston, a kaleidoscopic print by her neighbor Miriam Wosk, and Kerry James Marshall\u2019s plates emblazoned with protest slogans including \u201cWe Shall Overcome.\u201d<\/p>\n
Curator Ingrid Schaffner calls the miniature sculptures by Betye Saar and Takashi Murakami installed on discrete shelves \u201cthe house gods\u201d \u2014 works that, like the others, \u201canchor Eileen\u2019s day.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Harris Norton was growing up, her mother took her to museums and performances, and taught her that beauty was a right. Leaving the neighborhood for cultural events eventually led to leaving for school at Alexander Hamilton High School on the Westside. \u201cI was always an outsider,\u201d Harris Norton recalled.<\/p>\n
Before marrying Norton Utilities founder Peter Norton in 1983, Harris Norton taught bilingual education in public schools. The first piece of art she bought in 1976 was a linocut from the artist and activist Ruth Waddy at a printmaking demonstration. This marked the beginning of Harris Norton\u2019s preference for studio visits to gallery rounds, and personal relationships to market value. Harris Norton and her husband collected together throughout their marriage; after their divorce in 2000, she continued on her own.<\/p>\n
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Amy Sherald, \u201cWhen I Let Go Of What I Am, I Become What I Might Be (Self-Imagined Atlas)\u201d 2018, oil on canvas, is viewed at \u201cDestiny is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection\u201d at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d go so far as to say that the Nortons were the glue that sustained the young artists of the time,\u201d said conceptual artist Charles Gaines. \u201cThey first introduced and supported many of the artists who, as their reputations grew, expanded the significance and reputation of the city globally.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gaines said his work was still under the radar during his first show at Leo Castelli Gallery, and only two pieces sold. One went to Harris Norton.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was inspirational,\u201d Gaines said of his canvases that surfaced stereotypical, racially inflected words from documents with no explicit racial content. \u201cIt demonstrated that I could get support for difficult work.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDestiny is a Rose\u201d is organized in five chapters: \u201cHome,\u201d \u201cEssence,\u201d \u201cNear,\u201d \u201cFar\u201d and \u201cDeep,\u201d and proceeds in mostly chronological order. \u201cNear\u201d gathers work from the 1980s and \u201890s, primarily by L.A.-based artists Harris Norton met during studio visits around her Venice neighborhood.<\/p>\n
\u201cA woman named Nancy Kattler used to lead tours,\u201d Harris Norton explained. \u201cShe\u2019d rent a bus, give us boxed lunches, and we\u2019d visit maybe 10 studios.\u201d Harris Norton stood out. \u201cI was, well, different, and had a different point of view.\u201d That difference led her to acquire works including Alison Saar\u2019s \u201cBye Bye Blackbird\u201d (1992), featuring an angelic pair of wings assembled from worn-out shoe soles, and May Sun\u2019s lightbox sculpture \u201cReconfiguring the Urban Landscape\u201d (1992), which uses iron bars on sand to pair an illuminated image of destruction from the L.A. riots with a hexagram from the \u201cI Ching.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Betye Saar, \u201cSouvenir of friendship,\u201d 1977, mixed media, part of \u201cDestiny is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection\u201d at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
\u201cShe really made a conscious effort to support artists who weren\u2019t being embraced by the art world at the time,\u201d Sun explained. \u201cLike artists of color, experimental artists, artists thinking beyond the mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n
After first meeting Harris Norton at the Santa Monica Museum of Art \u2014 where Sun was one of six inaugural artists \u2014 Sun developed a relationship with the collector, who eventually commissioned her to make one of the family\u2019s annual Christmas gifts. Each year, the Nortons collaborated with an artist to produce an editioned work, sending it to friends along with a wide network of curators and museum directors.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt had a subversive side to it,\u201d Schaffner said of the annual gift. \u201cIt came with great generosity, but it was also a way of putting artists they might never have heard of before in the hands of the establishment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sun\u2019s contribution, for example, a set of printed silk napkins, ended up in the Brooklyn Museum\u2019s permanent collection.<\/p>\n
At a time when few museums had contemporary art departments \u2014 \u201cyou couldn\u2019t write a dissertation on a living artist,\u201d Schaffner notes \u2014 Harris Norton funded the scaffolding that would sustain the artists she collected. She underwrote curatorial travel, including a 1997 trip to the Johannesburg Biennial, where a cohort of American curators, among them Nancy Spector and Thelma Golden, encountered a genuinely global art world. She seeded what became the Contemporary Curators Conference, an annual gathering that gave a nascent generation a place to convene.<\/p>\n
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Exhibition curator Ingrid Schaffner at \u201cDestiny is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection\u201d at Hauser & Wirth in downtown Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Schaffner points out several striking black-and-white photographs by Catherine Opie and Lorna Simpson that document those years, identifying younger versions of seminal art world figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cFar\u201d traces expansion in two directions: geographic, as Norton\u2019s eye moved beyond California to Japan, Cuba, England; and social, into work breaking new ground on questions of gender, sexuality and post-colonial histories. When Japanese artists arrived on the West Coast, and MOCA hosted the formative \u201cSuperflat\u201d exhibition, titled for the artists\u2019 anime-inflected aesthetics, Norton added Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara to her collection, understanding, before most, the cultural importance of the event.<\/p>\n
Among the most affecting displays in the exhibition is a grouping by Jerome Caja, a queer performance artist from the Bay Area who died of complications from AIDS in 1995. His miniature fingernail polish paintings of everyday objects \u2014 a purse, a lipstick tube, a stiletto \u2014 are equal parts playful and macabre.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeep,\u201d the exhibition\u2019s final movement, features David Hammons\u2019 \u201cTraveling\u201d (2001-2), a large-scale drawing created by bouncing a basketball first in dirt and then on a piece of paper lifted off the wall by a battered suitcase, a reference to the distance between \u201cstreet\u201d culture and the gallery\u2019s white walls. On the opposing wall, Lorna Simpson\u2019s four-panel photo work \u201cYou\u2019re Fine\u201d (1988) depicts a reclining woman, her back turned to the camera between the phrases \u201cyou\u2019re fine\u201d and \u201cyou\u2019re hired,\u201d and a list of physical exam tests. Here, the Black female body, transformed first into a suite of medical data and then into an employee, is recalled as the historical site of institutional surveillance and social scrutiny.<\/p>\n
Many major museums, Schaffner says, \u201cwould give eyeteeth for these works today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Because Harris Norton collected these acclaimed artists while they were still relatively unknown, she is often described as prescient. But the term suggests a capacity to anticipate what the art market will value. Those familiar with her legacy, however, say Norton wasn\u2019t predicting the future; she was building it. At that time, accumulating works by women and artists of color working with nontraditional materials that defied formal categories, wasn\u2019t only uncommon \u2014 it wasn\u2019t done. <\/p>\n
Here, Patrick Martinez\u2019s blue and red neon sign, \u201cPromised Land\u201d (2022), hangs beside a video of Bradford playing basketball in a voluminous antebellum hoop skirt in \u201cPractice\u201d (2003). John Outterbridge\u2019s miniature shopping cart, packed with scraps of colored fabric and sewn sacks, is mounted on the wall facing Hammons\u2019 \u201cAfrican American Flag\u201d (1989), suspended from the ceiling.<\/p>\n
And Betye Saar\u2019s \u201cSouvenir of Friendship\u201d (1977), a mixed-media collage featuring an antique photo of the artist\u2019s aunt overlaid with lace, shares space with Lorraine O\u2019Grady\u2019s \u201cMlle Bourgeoise Noire\u201d (1980-83), a gown made from 180 pairs of white dinner gloves \u2014 worn during performances critiquing the exclusion of Black artists from the mainstream art world unless they made work that conformed to white expectations, or what she called \u201cart with white gloves on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the culture I want to be in,\u201d Schaffner said, looking around. \u201cWe\u2019re allowed to be in this world because of what she built, her dedication, her vision.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the corner of the final gallery is an Alma Thomas painting that usually hangs in Harris Norton\u2019s kitchen. \u201cUntitled\u201d (ca. 1968) is a wheel of concentric circles \u2014 chestnut at the center, then saffron, vermilion, peony pink, cerulean \u2014 each ring composed from individual daubs of paint that are both distinct and part of a larger whole. It\u2019s easy, standing before it, to think of Harris Norton\u2019s influence moving in the same way: outward, in ever-widening circles, from a single point of sustained attention.<\/p>\n
‘Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection’<\/p>\n
Where: Hauser & Wirth, 901-909 E 3rd St., Los Angeles<\/p>\n
When: 11 a.m.\u20136 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday<\/p>\n