Artsy Sistas: Eileen Norton & Thelma Golden @LACMA Opening Celebration of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum

These two cultured sistas have got it going on. Eileen Harris Norton and Thelma Golden were the black socialites on the scene and looked fabulous as they attended the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art's opening celebration for the Broad Contemporary Art Museum this past weekend.

Who is Eileen Harris Norton you ask? Well, Eileen is a philanthropist, very avid art collector and a former school teacher from Watts. She's the ex-wife of software guru Peter Norton, of Norton Utilities. Yes, as in the creator of Norton Anti-virus software! Eileen has two children by Peter and before they went through a$200 million divorce battle in the the early 2000's, they built a wildly successful software company and amassed one of the largest contemporary art collections in the world. They also established the Santa Monica-based Peter Norton Family Foundation, which Eileen continues to be active in, supporting and bringing attention to emerging artist.

Now onto the art expert, Thelma Golden. I've actually talked about Thelma Golden earlier on this site. This New York bred sista is the Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She's overseen cosmetic upgrades to the museum and is very instrumental in discovering and introducing Black artists. One of the most popular exhibitions she curated at Studio is Freestyle, an exhibition that included twenty-eight up and coming artists of African American backgrounds. Thelma has also guided the patronage of her friends Peter and Eileen Norton to emergent African American modernists. Thelma got her big break when she was named curator of the Whitney Museum in 1991. At the Whitney she spearheaded the Bob Thompson retrospective and curated the controversial 1994 "Black Male" show. She serves on numerous international art prize committees and is a juror for nearly all of the public art commissioned in NYC. Thelma is also known for coining the term ‘post-black’ art with friend and artist Glenn Ligon in the late 1990s.

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