Women, Care, and Legacy: Art History through the Eileen Harris Norton Collection

At this conversation about art, identity, and legacy, collector Eileen Harris Norton, artist Adia Millett, and writer-curator Taylor Renee Aldridge will discuss how collecting supports women artists of color and how personal vision can influence culture and community. 

A signing of the book All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection will follow the discussion. [link book title to LACMA store listing]

About the Book

All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection celebrates the work of women artists of color and the visionary collector who helped bring their art to light. Edited by Taylor Renee Aldridge, the book brings together essays by scholars and voices from across the art world to explore the deep connections between artists, Los Angeles–born patron Eileen Harris Norton, and the communities that shape and surround them.

Featuring work by Sonia Boyce, Maya Lin, Julie Mehretu, Shirin Neshat, Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Adia Millett, and many others, the book traces shared themes of memory, resilience, and resistance across painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. For nearly five decades, Harris Norton has helped shape the art world by supporting artists and curators of color.

With essays by leading curators and scholars, All These Liberations is a testament to the power of art, care, and creative community to imagine new possibilities.

Eileen Harris Norton’s philanthropy and art collecting reflect her long-standing interests in contemporary art, early childhood education, parenting, child welfare, and women’s issues. She is President of The Eileen Harris Norton Foundation, which she founded in 2009, focusing on education, family, and the environment, with an emphasis on low-income children of color. She is also a dedicated art collector with strong interest in work by artists of color (particularly artists of the African diaspora), women artists, and artists of Southern California. Her extensive art-lending program has sent works of art from the collection on loan to museum exhibitions around the world.

In 2014, she co-founded Art + Practice in Los Angeles with artist Mark Bradford and activist Allan DiCastro; the organization hosts a robust program of exhibitions and events, and also supports the needs of foster youth (ages 18-24) through paid internships, scholarships, and other vital programs and opportunities. She has also served on the boards of the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Adia Millet is a Bay area artist who received her BFA from the University of California at Berkeley and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Millett's art honors the history of domestic craft, abstraction, architecture, and landscape, while being inspired by afro futurism, human resilience, and the preservation of our land. Her work ranges from painting, quilting, glass, mosaic, video, sculpture, to installation. Her most recent museum exhibitions include ICA San Jose and Di Rosa Center for the Arts. In the last few years, Millett has focused on public projects including pieces at Bishop O’Dowd, Lowell Park, UCSF Medical Center and currently The Children’s Hospital and Mosswood Park in Oakland.

Taylor Renee Aldridge is a writer and curator based in Detroit, Michigan. In 2014, with writer Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. In Fall 2024, she assumed the role of Executive Director at the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation.  

Taylor has edited and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs, including Enunciated Life (CAAM, 2021) and Mario Moore | Enshrined: Presence + Preservation (Charles H. Wright Museum, 2021), and is the editor of All These Liberations: Women Artists in the Eileen Harris Norton Collection (Yale University Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art21, ARTNews, CanadianArt, Contemporary&, Detroit Metro Times and SFMOMA’s Open Space.

Taylor has organized exhibitions with the California African American Museum (CAAM), Detroit Institute of Arts, and Cranbrook Art Museum. She is the recipient of the 2016 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for Art Journalism. She holds an MLA from Harvard University with a concentration in Museum Studies and a BA from Howard University with a concentration in Art History.