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| Uta Barth, Deep Blue Day (12.9), 2012. Eileen Harris Norton Collection |
Hauser & Wirth often schedules ambitious non-selling exhibitions to coincide with Frieze week. This year there are two: in West Hollywood,
a show built around Arshile Gorky's 1941 road trip to California with Isamu Noguchi (through Apr. 25, 2026); and in downtown L.A., an unprecedented
in-depth showing of Eileen Harris Norton's collection.
Regular museum visitors will be familiar with the name, for Harris Norton often lends her holdings of work by contemporary African-American artists. In 2020 Art + Practice (which Harris Norton co-founded with Mark Bradford) did a small show of selected works from the collection. The Hauser & Wirth exhibition is far bigger, with pieces by 83 artists. The title "Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection" is taken from a 1990 Kerry James Marshall painting. Marshall was barely known when Harris Norton bought Destiny Is a Rose. As the show amply demonstrates, she has had a knack for spotting talent before the art market and museums do.
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| Kerry James Marshall, Destiny Is a Rose, 1990 |
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| Installation view with works by Belkis Ayon, Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare, Marlene Dumas, and Fred Tomaselli |
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| Ruth Waddy, The Exhorters, 1976 |
The show marks Harris Norton's 50th anniversary as a collector. The first work she bought was a linocut print by Ruth Waddy, doyenne of the emerging post-Watts L.A. art community. Eileen was then a schoolteacher, and her mother told her she should buy something after attending a free printmaking demonstration.
In 1983 Eileen married software entrepreneur Peter Norton. Both were interested in art, though it wasn't until they sold their software business in 1990 that they had the resources to become major collectors. A decade later the couple divorced, splitting the collection.
"Destiny Is a Rose" is arranged chronologically—by acquisition rather than creation date. This arrangement shows that many of the highest profile pieces have been added recently.
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| L–R: Bob Thompson, Well, 1960; David Hammons, African American Flag, 1989; Noah Davis, Pueblo Del Rio, Stain Glass Pants, 2014 |
The earliest work on view is a 1936 James Van Der Zee photographic portrait. The earliest painting (I think) is a 1960 Bob Thompson. Eileen was an early adopter of David Hammons, the Saar family, and Mark Bradford, to name just a few. Overall she has assembled, let's say, the Geffen collection of late 20th-early 21st century Black art. The selection is so near-comprehensive that you find yourself strategizing the omissions. There's no Kehinde Wiley or Njideka Akunyili Crosby (though Harris Norton lent a Wiley to the California African American Museum in 2017, and Art + Practice gave Crosby her first L.A. show.) There's no Barkley Hendricks, despite a recent effort to push the chronological limits back a few years.
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| Patrick Martinez, Promised Land, 2022 |
There are works by non-Black artists as various as Jeffrey Valance, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Fred Tomaselli, Catherine Opie, Takashi Murakami, and Patrick Martinez. One room of memorabilia includes a selection of the artist-designed Christmas multiples the Nortons inaugurated in 1988.
"Destiny Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Collection" is at Hauser & Wirth downtown through August. 16, 2026.
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| Alma Thomas, untitled, about 1968 |
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Fred Eversley, untitled (parabolic lens), 1969/2019
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Eversley's polyester lens distorts the image of a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light bulb piece.
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| David Hammons, Cigarette Holder, 1990 |
I wouldn't have guessed the artist. The media are wire and Lucky Strikes.
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| Faith Ringgold, Wanted: Douglass, Tubman and Truth, 1997 |
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| Beatriz Milhazes, Ovo de Páscoa, 2003 |
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| Fred Wilson, Shatter, 2003 |
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| William Pope.L, Flint Water 12 Pack, 2017 |
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| Amy Sherald, When I Let Go of What I Am, I Become What I Might Be (Self-Imagined Atlas), 2010 |
Comments
I've been looking at videos of the Bregenz Museum in Austria designed by Peter Zumthor. Assuming its top-floor galleries at least are brightened up by a skylight, Zumthor's Geffen Galleries are under a solid roof. However, they do have a lot of windows.
Contemporary art from a Norton collection or otherwise doesn't look necessarily ideal when surrounded by mainly gray concrete. Such a surface is supposed to be handled better by building crews in Europe/Asia than in America/LA. If so, oh-oh, Houston, we have a problem.
While ancient or old-time societies didn't have indoor plumbing, they still managed to do visually, technically, aesthetically stunning things. Structures like the Pantheon or Versailles are mind-boggling.
The Geffen Galleries better at least have great bathrooms and impressive heating, cooling and air-filter systems.
As for LACMA's budget and exhibition schedules, if they're analogous to a mud hat or a chamber pot, the museum will be revisiting another version of 1965's "yikes!!"