In February, Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles gallery will stage a show of masterpieces from the holdings of Eileen Harris Norton, an important collector based in the city. The exhibition will open on February 24, making it one of the key exhibitions taking place in LA during the Frieze Los Angeles art fair.
Titled “Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection,” the exhibition will feature major works by Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, Alma Thomas, David Hammons, and many more, to say little of pieces by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Beatriz Milhazes, and other giants of recent art history. As part of the show, Hauser & Wirth is also printing a catalog devoted to Harris Norton’s collection, in what is being billed as a first.
Hauser & Wirth has a tradition of staging large-scale exhibitions of high-quality private collections, with the most recent one, in 2018, devoted to that of Sylvio Perlstein, who died earlier this year. The Harris Norton show, like those other presentations, will not be a selling show.
Harris Norton has been collecting since 1976, the year she bought a Ruth Waddy print. For over a decade, she appeared on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list alongside her former husband, Peter Norton. During the ’80s, the two made a habit of visiting artists studios. Later on, they also made a habit of buying art.
Harris Norton, who worked as a teacher before cofounding a software company with Norton, is today best known in LA for launching Art + Practice with artist Mark Bradford and activist Allan DiCastro. (Harrison Norton has also collected work by Bradford, whom Hauser & Wirth represents.) Founded in 2014, the socially minded organization has since worked with institutions such as the California African American Museum and the Hammer Museum to mount shows and foster the creation of new artworks.
Activities such as these have made Harris Norton important to figures such as Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem. “Eileen Harris Norton is a pivotal figure within the arts landscape,” Golden told ARTnews in 2024. “Her vital support of countless artists, many of whom are now household names, has amplified the visions of those whose perspectives have contributed so meaningfully to a dynamic and vibrant art world.”
The 80-work Hauser & Wirth show will trace Harris Norton’s rise, beginning in the period during the ’80s and ’90s when she focused largely on LA artists and then moving onto the time afterward where she turned her focus global with acquisitions of art by Isaac Julien, Mona Hatoum, and more.
A look at some of the works in the exhibition follows below.
