Haggerty Museum of Art Receives Gift of Twenty Nine Works of Contemporary Art from the Norton Collection

(Milwaukee, WI)  The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University has been named as one of twenty nine museums in the United States and abroad to receive gifts of contemporary artwork from the well-known collection of Peter and Eileen Norton. The Haggerty, along with the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Gallery of Art at Johnson County Community College, are the only Midwestern venues among the gift recipients.

The Nortons have announced they are donating nearly 1,000 works, with a total estimated value of more than $2 million, to institutions including The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of America Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Tate Gallery in London.

"The gift of Peter and Eileen Norton will help boost the stature and visibility of emerging artists in the international art world. The generous contribution made to the Haggerty Museum of Art, in particular, will substantially increase the presence of younger contemporary artists in the Museum's permanent collection, and act as a compliment to many of the exhibitions on contemporary art featured at the Haggerty," said Curtis L. Carter, Director of the Haggerty Museum of Art.

"On behalf of the Museum and the city, I would like to thank Peter and Eileen Norton, as well as Thomas Solomon (Norton Foundation consultant) and Susan Cahan (Senior Curator of the Norton Collection) for selecting the Haggerty as a participant in this important project."

The Nortons are donating the works, organized in thematic packages, in the hope of strengthening the presence of contemporary art and disseminating its adventuresome spirit throughout the United States. Most of the gifts are going to college and university art galleries and to institutions outside the biggest cities, bringing the works of challenging younger artists to the attention of a broader public and building the collections of the most active and vibrant of America's smaller museums.

The great majority of the pieces in the Norton donation were made in the 1990s and are the work of younger artists. Among the twenty nine artworks donated to the Haggerty Museum are paintings, sculpture, photography, and mixed media pieces by Michele Oka Doner, Robert Helm, Alexis Rockman, Gregory Crewdson and Judy Pfaff. The Haggerty Museum of Art is planning to feature the Norton gift in a special exhibition in the fall of 2000.

The Nortons began to assemble their art collection in the 1980s, concentrating on new works that embodied socially meaningful ideas in visually exciting forms. The couple stepped up their collecting in 1990, the year Mr. Norton merged his company, Peter Norton Computing, Inc., with Symantec Corp. Since then, the Nortons have consistently been included on the ArtNews list of the worldís 200 top collectors. Through the present donation, the Nortons are giving away some 40 percent of their existing collection.

The donation follows upon a decade of similar initiatives by Eileen and Peter Norton. Among the coupleís best-known philanthropies in the arts has been the Curatorís Grant Program, initiated in 1990. Each year, the Nortons provide discretionary funds to two or three contemporary art curators of exceptional merit, so the curators can purchase works of art for their institutions. In this way, the Nortons have rewarded and encouraged fresh thinking by curators, developed a nationwide community among curators, built the collections of museums, and provided much-needed sales to artists.

Independent curator Thomas Solomon and the Nortons' Senior Curator Susan Cahan surveyed institutions throughout the United States on behalf of the Nortons in order to propose a list of smaller museums and university art galleries that might benefit from the donation. The Nortons hope their gifts will inspire others to be inventive in supporting these museums.

"Even the biggest museums have very limited funds for the purchase of contemporary art," Peter Norton explains. "The many smaller art museums and arts centers are even shorter on acquisition funds. So we thought the most interesting and beneficial thing we could do was to create mini-collections that would be organized in some meaningful way -- by region, for example, or by subject -- and donate them to lean but admirable arts institutions across the country: the university galleries and museums in smaller cities that have shown spunk and interest in this realm."

"Our purpose," Mr. Norton continues, "is to respond to the rise of cultural excellence across the United States. Virtually every regional capital, from Miami to Seattle, now has some cultural facility that exhibits contemporary art and collects it to the extent it can. That's an important phenomenon - but it's gone unheralded. So, as much as we honor world leaders such as MoMA and the Tate, we feel that's not enough. To do our part for the values of experimental art, we also want to help strengthen these important smaller institutions all around the country."

The regional museums receiving gifts through the Norton donation include the Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach; Oakland Museum of California; Portland Art Museum (Oregon), and San Jose Museum of Art.

The donation also expresses the Nortons' ongoing concern with education. Ten teaching institutions are receiving gifts, including The Art Museum, Princeton University; University Art Museum, Santa Barbara; University of California Berkeley Art Museum; and the Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University.

For more information and images from the Norton Collection