POWER BROKER

Home is where the art is for American collector and philanthropist Eileen Harris Norton

- HARRIET LLOYD-SMITH

There are words frequently found in the art collecting vocabulary: primary, secondary, provenance, blue-chip, flip. When we speak via Zoom, Eileen Harris Norton doesn’t use any of these. Instead, she favors words like passion, education and opportunity. For her, the value of art lies in its ability to promote tangible change; art is both a social and economic investment.

In recent years, issues of racial injustice and the lack of visibility given to artists of color have come to the fore. But, as many museums frantically retrofit their collections to include a wider range of perspectives, some voices have been championing underrepresented creatives for decades.

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. ‘My mom saw the ad in the paper, and we said, oh, let’s go to this because the artist was a Black woman. We didn’t know any artists, and we certainly didn’t know any Black women artists,’ Norton explains from her home in Santa Monica.