February 2000 Issue
California Software Entrepreneur Peter Norton Donates 17 Works To Weatherspoon Art Gallery
Peter Norton, the man whose name is synonymous with troubleshooting computer software, has donated 17 works of contemporary art to Weatherspoon Art Gallery at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC.
The California software entrepreneur and his wife, Eileen Norton, have named Weatherspoon as among 29 recipients of nearly 1,000 artworks from their extensive collection of modern art. The gallery expects to receive the gift sometime this spring and is planning an exhibition in July and August.
"The Weatherspoon Art Gallery is thrilled and honored to have been selected as one of the recipients of the Norton Gift," said Nancy Doll, director. "Collectively and individually, the 17 works we have been given are important additions to our collection".
"The group fills a gap for us in terms of conceptually-based paintings and painting-based works from the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s. This was a time when the viability of painting was again being questioned but also a time when a number of artists persisted in exploring the possibilities of painting. The acknowledgement of the Nortons with this gift reinforces the Weatherspoon's reputation for collecting and exhibiting interesting and sometimes challenging contemporary art."
The Nortons say they 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."
Other recipients include The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Tate Gallery in London. Most of the gifts are going to college and university art galleries and to institutions outside the biggest cities, bringing the work 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.
"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 matter - and donate them to lean but admirable art institutions across the country: the university galleries and museums in smaller cities that have shown spunk and interest in this realm."
The theme of the Weatherspoon group is conceptually-based works that investigate painting issues and concerns, though not always through materials that are traditional to painting, Doll said.
For example, two works by Michael Gonzalez are composed of the red, yellow and blue dots cut from Wonder Bread hot dog wrappers "sandwiched" between acrylic sheets, Another is a large wall composition by Kent Young made of a variety of variously colored fabrics. Other characteristics of the group are a postmodern referencing of other artistic styles and periods, such as Pop and Minimalism, the incorporation of text and the assertion of the painting as an object in and of itself without being representational or referential, Doll said.
Several artists, while still young, have fairly established reputations and a number are represented by well-known galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Among the better-know artists are Sue Williams, whose work has been included in the last three Whitney Biennial exhibitions, and Christian Schumann, who is represented in the Whitney's collection. Schumann was also one of critic Jerry Saltz's picks of "10 Artists for the '90s." Lawrence Carroll, Michael Gonzalez and Terry Allen are all well-known on the West Coast.
The selection process has been under way for some time, Doll said. The Norton's senior curator, Susan Cahan, and independent curator Thomas Solomon 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.
Doll thinks the Weatherspoon was tapped as a recipient in part because of shared connections in the art world. She has known the Nortons for a number of years and also knows their curator and the project consultant. The Nortons' foundation also helped support the presentation of the Jim Isermann traveling exhibition at the Weatherspoon last year.
"I believe they also know the work of our curator of exhibitions, Ron Platt," Doll said. "Beyond that, I like to think that they simply respect the Weatherspoon's program."
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 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 world's 200 top collectors. Through the present donation, they are giving away 40 percent of their existing collection.
The Nortons hope their gifts will inspire others to be inventive in supporting these museums.
"Our purpose," Norton said, "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 (the Museum of Modern Art) 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."
For further information call the Gallery at 336/334-5371 or check out their web site at (http://www.uncg.edu).
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