In February, Hauser & Wirth’s Downtown Los Angeles gallery will stage a present of masterpieces from the holdings of Eileen Harris Norton, an essential collector primarily based within the metropolis. The exhibition will open on February 24, making it one of many key exhibitions going down in LA through the Frieze Los Angeles artwork honest.
Titled “Future Is a Rose: The Eileen Harris Norton Assortment,” the exhibition will characteristic main works by Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, Alma Thomas, David Hammons, and lots of extra, to say little of items by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Beatriz Milhazes, and different giants of current artwork historical past. As a part of the present, Hauser & Wirth can be printing a catalog dedicated to Harris Norton’s assortment, in what’s being billed as a primary.
Hauser & Wirth has a convention of staging large-scale exhibitions of high-quality non-public collections, with the newest one, in 2018, dedicated to that of Sylvio Perlstein, who died earlier this 12 months. The Harris Norton present, like these different displays, won’t be a promoting present.
Harris Norton has been amassing since 1976, the 12 months she purchased a Ruth Waddy print. For over a decade, she appeared on the ARTnews High 200 Collectors record alongside her former husband, Peter Norton. Throughout the ’80s, the 2 made a behavior of visiting artists studios. In a while, additionally they made a behavior of shopping for artwork.
Harris Norton, who labored as a instructor earlier than cofounding a software program firm with Norton, is in the present day greatest identified in LA for launching Artwork + Apply with artist Mark Bradford and activist Allan DiCastro. (Harrison Norton has additionally collected work by Bradford, whom Hauser & Wirth represents.) Based in 2014, the socially minded group has since labored with establishments such because the California African American Museum and the Hammer Museum to mount exhibits and foster the creation of latest artworks.
Actions reminiscent of these have made Harris Norton essential to figures reminiscent of Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem. “Eileen Harris Norton is a pivotal determine throughout the arts panorama,” Golden advised ARTnews in 2024. “Her important help of numerous artists, a lot of whom are actually family names, has amplified the visions of these whose views have contributed so meaningfully to a dynamic and vibrant artwork world.”
The 80-work Hauser & Wirth present will hint Harris Norton’s rise, starting within the interval through the ’80s and ’90s when she targeted largely on LA artists after which transferring onto the time afterward the place she turned her focus world with acquisitions of artwork by Isaac Julien, Mona Hatoum, and extra.
A have a look at a number of the works within the exhibition follows beneath.
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Kerry James Marshall, Future Is a Rose, 1990
Picture Credit score: Joshua White/©Kerry James Marshall/Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Earlier than he painted his signature photos situating Black figures in tableaux evoking art-historical imagery, Kerry James Marshall made works reminiscent of this one, during which painted-over paperback covers that includes white ladies encompass a Black lady.
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Mark Bradford, Half a Man, 2009
Picture Credit score: Keith Lubow/©Mark Bradford/Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Mark Bradford is thought for summary work that make use of textual content, usually to touch upon histories of racism and erasure.
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Lorraine O‘Grady, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, 1980–83
Picture Credit score: Charles White/©2026 Lorraine O’Grady Belief /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy Alexander Grey Associates, New York Lorraine O’Grady donned this gown for performances during which she crashed artwork occasions underneath the persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, a middle-class lady who addressed her viewers, telling viewers, “Black artwork should take extra dangers!”
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Alison Saar, Bye Bye Blackbird, 1992
Picture Credit score: Joshua White/©Alison Saar/Courtesy the artist and L.A. Louver, Venice, California With a reputation referring to a 1926 music famously carried out by Miles Davis, this set up options wings with out anybody to put on them and a suitcase that doesn’t open, with a mysterious illumination beckoning viewers to attempt to gaze inside. It alludes to dying and loss with out offering an apparent narrative.
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David Hammons, African American Flag, 1989
Picture Credit score: Keith Lubow/©2026 David Hammons/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York For one in every of his most well-known works, David Hammons remade the celebrities and stripes in purple, inexperienced, and black—the colours of the Pan-African flag. An identical piece greets viewers on the newly reopened Studio Museum in Harlem, to which Harris Norton has gifted artworks by Hammons, Chris Ofili, and others.
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Alma Thomas, Untitled, ca. 1968
Picture Credit score: Joshua White/©2025 Property of Alma Thomas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Courtesy the Hart Household Lots of Alma Thomas’s work resemble starbursts and cosmic phenomena. An identical portray hung within the White Home through the Obama administration.
