Destiny Is a Rose:
The Eileen Harris Norton Collection

A third-generation Californian, Eileen Harris Norton grew up in sight of Simon Rodia’s famous towers in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was twelve years old when the 1965 riots transformed her working class neighborhood into a flashpoint of the American Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. A graduate of the University of Southern California and University of California Los Angeles, she taught public school elementary English as a second language before co-founding, with her former husband Peter Norton, the software company that they later sold to Symantec.

Since the 1980s, Harris Norton’s reputation as a collector has developed in tandem with her philanthropy, providing direct support to a generation of museum curators—including Kellie Jones, Thelma Golden and Lowery Stokes Sims—who have all systemically changed who and how institutions collect. In 2014, she co-founded Art + Practice (A+P) with artist Mark Bradford and activist Allan DiCastro in Leimert Park, the historically Black Los Angeles neighborhood where Bradford grew up and first maintained a studio. Serving local youth transitioning from foster care and, through global partnerships, children experiencing displacement worldwide, A+P embodies her conviction that art can be a catalyst for care. Then, in 2019, she established the Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, extending her commitment to social and environmental justice through initiatives supporting education, families and the environment.

Photo: Eileen Harris Norton. Santa Monica, 2020. Courtesy the Eileen Harris Norton Collection. Photo: Joshua White