‘He talked about my hair and he didn’t like the way it was styled. Indeed, Bradford invited Norton to his mother’s beauty salon, which later became his studio. I probably even offered her a treatment!’ ‘I was making paintings using endpapers, so, naturally, we talked about hair. ‘The studio visit is such a tradition in the art world, but I didn’t really know what I was doing,’ says Bradford, who, at that point, was still working as a hairdresser and had never sold a painting. Norton and Bradford met at a studio visit suggested by the curator Thelma Golden. One of the most significant artists in her collection – in more ways than one – is LA native Mark Bradford (W*267). Its walls are liberally adorned with works by the likes of Kerry James Marshall and Frank Gehry (the latter, whom Norton has known for many years, lives a few doors down). Her 1906 Craftsman home was designed by architects Elmer Grey and Myron Hunt. ‘I collected Black artists who were undervalued and not being shown in the late 1980s and early 1990s, while other collectors were not.’ ‘When we started collecting, they were nobodies, they were these young artists, but we decided, these young Black artists are worthy,’ she says. Artists such as Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, who are household names today, but were not when they were first hung. They began collecting work focused on African American, African diaspora and women artists, often with a strong LA thread.
‘We would just walk around and into people’s studios and it was something we did when we didn’t have any money,’ she recalls. In the 1980s, she and her then-husband, Peter Norton (of Norton Antivirus), were working to get Peter’s company off the ground while living in an artist studio hotspot in Venice, California. In many ways, Norton – who was born in the LA neighbourhood of Watts and was once an elementary school teacher – might be described as an art godmother of sorts, but she never set out to become a collector. Courtesy the Eileen Harris Norton Collection Above: Warm Broad Glow, 2005, a neon and paint work by New York artist Glenn Ligon, photographed with a fisheye lens. Wood, dutch wax printed cotton, metal, fiberglass. Top: Yinka Shonibare, Pedagogy Boy/Boy, 2003. ‘I bought Ruth Waddy long before I could call myself a collector or even knew of the art world.’ I had no idea that she was this wonderful, powerful woman,’ says Norton. ‘Several scholars spoke about how Ruth Waddy was apparently like the godmother of many Black LA-based artists at the time.
#Old craftsman table saw from 80s full#
But it was only when Norton included her work in a 2020 show that the full weight of Waddy’s influence on 20th-century LA art came to light. The artist was Ruth Waddy, an LA-based printmaker, editor and activist. We didn’t know any artists, and we certainly didn’t know any Black women artists,’ Norton explains from her home in Santa Monica. ‘My mom saw the ad in the paper, and we said, oh, let’s go to this because the artist was a Black woman.
Norton’s art journey began in the 1970s when she and her mother visited a Black History Month exhibition at LA’s Museum of African American Art. But, as many museums frantically retrofit their collections to include a wider range of perspectives, some voices have been championing underrepresented creatives for decades. In recent years, issues of racial injustice and the lack of visibility given to artists of colour have come to the fore. For her, the value of art lies in its ability to promote tangible change art is both a social and economic investment. Instead, she favours words like passion, education and opportunity. When we speak via Zoom, Eileen Harris Norton doesn’t use any of these. There are words frequently found in the art collecting vocabulary: primary, secondary, provenance, blue-chip, flip.
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