Before opening her gallery in 2002, Norris had a successful career in the tech industry. She worked in management consulting in a wide range of tech-centered companies before moving to San Francisco, where she focused exclusively on startups. With an MBA and corporate experience in Fortune 50 environments, she felt well-equipped to build and launch companies, which she did successfully for several years.
Her last tech venture was a company pioneering sophisticated cloud-storage technologies long before “the cloud” entered the mainstream. Norris was the vice president of marketing, responsible for the messaging and positioning of a complex system, essentially creating an industry segment that did not yet exist. “I always felt that my job in tech was being a translator, taking these ideas of these brilliant, highly scientific founders and figuring out how to make broad audiences care about what they were building,” she tells Observer. “Working with minds like that, you’re constantly translating complicated ideas into human language. Honestly, that’s not so different from what I do with artists today: turning complex ideas into accessible narratives.”
Yet Norris recalls that even on the day her company appeared on The Wall Street Journal’s front page, she ended up reading the adjacent art article first. “The launch of my company was in the A-1 column. It should have been a PR dream. But the middle column was a review of an art exhibition. I read the art story before I read the one about my own company. That should have told me something,” she reflects.
Then the company collapsed during the dot-com crisis in what was an eye-opening moment. “I had 40 people working for me, but when everything fell apart, I realized I was working insane hours, I was in my 30s and I wasn’t passionate about it.”
Norris left and began traveling, circling the world with a backpack, visiting Asia and Central America. She had been in Cuba for an extended period—illegally then—when she decided she wanted to have a gallery. “I wanted to follow my passion. I was incredibly moved by the people I met there: poets, musicians, artists. That was the turning point.”
Norris had no real understanding of the art industry at the time. She was an art collector, albeit on a small scale, and she’d had a particularly negative early experience. “I was trying to make what, for me at 33, was a major purchase—maybe $20,000, which is like $50,000 today—and galleries in New York literally wouldn’t talk to me. I was ready to buy, and the rudeness and inaccessibility were off-putting.”
Having grown up in the Midwest with limited exposure to museums and having taken only a single art history class (in Spanish, while studying abroad), Norris traces her earliest connection to art back to a transformative encounter with Las Meninas at the Prado: “I had a profound experience in front of Las Meninas. Goosebumps. That sense of what great art can do, how it reminds you what it is to be human, stuck with me.”
Determined to build a different kind of space, she wrote a business plan, complete with Venn diagrams and market analyses, but at its core, her goal was simple: to show art she loved and to make it accessible. From the start, Norris built her gallery around human relationships and community, bringing in many people from the tech industry she knew, whom other galleries had failed to engage.
Many of her earliest tech clients, including senior Google executives, were people one would never identify on sight; they valued privacy but expected clarity and transparency when acquiring anything, including art. “My background helped. I’d raised venture capital, I’d had successful exits, so I could speak their language when needed,” she explains.
She initially partnered with someone meant to bring curatorial expertise while she handled operations and sales. However, as the gallery began working with Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Dorothea Tanning, she realized that secondary-market work required a different skill set—legal contracts, title transfers and complex private negotiations. “For me, that business side wasn’t intimidating. I’d been selling million-dollar software systems. Selling million-dollar artworks didn’t scare me. The content did, at first, but not the numbers.”
Stepping back, Norris recalls that the first show she ever organized entirely on her own came before the gallery officially opened. It featured two artist friends, Kate Eric, a collaborative duo. “I did the show in their studio and sold the whole thing out on opening night. The first work I ever sold went to someone from my tech life. I remember thinking, ‘Okay, I can do this.'” That early success gave her confidence that she could, in fact, run a gallery. Norris would eventually sell around 250 of their works and guide them through a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Museum but then witness their professional partnership and careers dissolve when the artists divorced shortly afterward, a reminder of how fragile even the most promising artistic trajectories can be.
The gallery’s early programming reflected her early partner’s preferences, while Norris focused primarily on the business side. The first exhibition she curated herself—which mixed 20th- and 21st-century artists and paired Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington with living artists she felt would expand the conversation—received a sharply negative review from critic Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle. Her first dedicated Carrington exhibition wouldn’t happen until 2007, but Norris had already begun acquiring works by Carrington, Tanning and Varo roughly 20 years earlier, long before they achieved the visibility they have today.
Whitney Chadwick, whose book “Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement” pioneered scholarship in a field now at the center of both institutional and market attention, introduced Norris to Carrington’s work. “It’s still the foundation for everything. Whitney happened to be based in San Francisco then, so she and I met regularly. She and Leonora were incredibly close, and she walked me through all of the history and context. She became my real mentor.”
Susan Aberth, a leading active scholar on Carrington, also encouraged her to meet the artist. “She didn’t have gallery representation, and they warned me that she didn’t like most people and didn’t suffer fools,” Norris says. “‘Just be yourself,’ they said, ‘and bring gifts—good drawing paper, pulpy mystery novels, and proper English tea.’”
So Norris flew to Mexico. “It was about 22 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first child, which is how I remember the timing. I showed up with my dog, my gifts, and not much of a plan,” she recalls. “She liked me instantly. She loved the name Wendy, straight from Peter Pan. And she adored animals. She had a magnet of her favorite cat, Monsieur, on her refrigerator. I showed her a picture of my cat, Toro, and they looked identical. She decided Toro was Monsieur reincarnated, and we were off.”
The two fell into an endless, free-ranging conversation: politics, the Catholic Church, Mexico’s entrenched patriarchy, even overpopulation. After hours of tea and talk, Carrington walked her out to a cab and introduced her to a longtime friend and attorney, who would later become an important figure in her own life. “That day was the start of seven years of visits and long phone calls,” Norris recalls. “I was a young mom with two babies, so I couldn’t always travel as much as I wish I had, looking back. But yes, in our own way, we adopted each other. It was a magical bond.”
Norris notes that when people focus solely on the haunting and stratified symbolism of Carrington’s work, they often overlook the fact that she was incredibly funny—she possessed a wicked sense of humor, which Norris views as a sign of great intellect. “It takes a considerable amount of time to understand Leonora’s world truly. I’m still learning; every time I look at one of her paintings, I see something new, another layer of symbology.”
Norris immediately understood and appreciated Carrington’s and other artists’ ability to weave symbolic tales and translate their powerful imaginary universes into continuous storytelling—world-building through both visual and written language.
In a previous interview with Art Basel, Norris described her program as “textual,” “poetic” and “narrative-driven.” One of the threads she returns to is that many of her artists have a strong literary underpinning. “It’s not always narrative, exactly, but there’s a deep engagement with the written word,” she explains. “Carrington, Tanning, Rahon, Varo—they were all exceptional writers and poets. Among my contemporary artists, Chitra is an extraordinary writer, María Magdalena Campos-Pons is a brilliant narrator, and Enrique Martínez Celaya has published countless books.”
Norris has an affinity for artists who engage with myth, working within mystical and spiritual dimensions and drawing on archetypal and ancestral symbologies shared across time and place. Indeed, she readily acknowledges that she has always been drawn to pagan rituals and different cosmologies, and through her artists, she learned more. “I grew up around a haunted house, I believe in ghosts, and I’d already had a ghost encounter when I lived in Paris working in tech,” she says, recalling how Carrington loved that story and wanted to hear it again and again. “I’ve always believed in other spirit worlds, so I understood what she was attuned to. That connection was real. I think that’s part of why I responded so sincerely to her work, to Remedios, and to the others.”
Yet Norris also believes that her lively humanistic curiosity helped the art world make sense. “I can’t think of many professions where your learning curve never plateaus,” she says. “The amount I’ve learned from my artists, from collectors, from museum curators—many of whom are now very close friends—is extraordinary. I’m a sponge, and the art world feeds that endlessly. That’s not the case in most professions.”
For the same reason, Norris works to stay attuned to shifts in the industry, often anticipating trends long before they crystallize. Today, as the art world broadly reckons with the reality that the traditional gallery model no longer fits the pace, scale and globalized dynamics of the market or the changing habits of a new generation of collectors, her earlier pivots feel prescient.
In 2017, Norris, who describes herself as a data junkie, looked at the numbers and realized that less than 10 percent of her sales came from the gallery’s 6,000-square-foot space in downtown San Francisco. The figures made the decision clear: she reimagined the brick-and-mortar model entirely, moved her headquarters into a smaller footprint space and embraced a nomadic, decentralized strategy, staging exhibitions in vacant commercial spaces around the world. Her 2017 shift to off-site projects eventually paved the way for the major Carrington show and, ultimately, the Venice Biennale moment.
While much of her market is centered in New York, Norris says she doesn’t feel the need to maintain a permanent space there; California is home, and she prefers to balance both worlds. “I’m an innovator. From how I run a business to how I compensate my team and run my life, I’ve always tried to forget everything I know and ask: what’s the purest version of what I actually want to do?”
Norris’s model is now deeply artist-driven, grounded in being strategic and intentional with shows and fairs so she can go where her artists’ markets and audiences are and where she knows their work will be well-received and celebrated. “We approach each artist strategically, one by one,” she asserts. When it comes to fairs, she intentionally selects only two or three a year, bringing highly curated presentations conceived explicitly for that context rather than what she jokingly describes as the ‘charcuterie board’ approach common among galleries.
Looking ahead to Miami, she said that what excited her wasn’t the convention center or the scene but the opportunity to introduce Enrique Martínez Celaya’s work to the people who need to stand in front of it. Visitors might arrive asking for the Carrington drawings but stay for Martínez Celaya, and this kind of direct encounter with work is what makes the fair worthwhile. “I want the people who need to know his work—institutions, top collectors—to stand in front of those paintings and feel what I feel. They don’t translate digitally. You have to be there physically. That’s the thrill.”
Her key priority remains being able to make a generative difference in an artist’s legacy or career. “My approach with our artists is incredibly holistic, almost old school. We publish, we’re constantly organizing, lending to museums, and thinking about commissions,” she explains. “The majority of what we do isn’t sales. We’re looking at our artists from every angle: what they’re publishing, where they should be seen, how to support them strategically.”
This approach has driven the revaluation of Carrington, Varo, Tanning and other artists Norris has championed for at least two decades. She laughs at the memory of how different things were when she started: “When I met Leonora 22 years ago, her work didn’t sell much. The same goes for Dorothea Tanning—I could buy a Tanning for next to nothing until a few years ago. And now look at where we are.”
Norris recalls the moment she realized how dramatically the conversation had expanded. “After Cecilia and I first talked about using The Milk of Dreams, and she asked whether I could secure the copyright, I knew things were shifting. Suddenly our little microcosm of a gallery in San Francisco was part of a global conversation.” Norris had also been Simone Leigh’s dealer for quite a while, who that year would represent the U.S., and she had six of her fifteen artists in the biennale—a clear sign that something in her vision was right.
When asked why audiences seem newly receptive to the symbolic, mythic and esoteric worlds her artists explore, she didn’t hesitate. “It’s 2025. The pace of technological change, political chaos, the anxiety around A.I.—people can’t even articulate what’s happening,” she reflects. “Whether you’re in Delhi, Mexico City, Doha or San Francisco, we’re all grappling with the same human-condition concerns. And my artists have been ahead of the curve for decades. Carrington and Varo saw all of this coming. So did Wolfgang Paalen. So does Chitra Ganesh today. The world is finally catching up.”
As we wrap up, Norris pauses, thinking. “There’s a Czech priest who said the biggest problem of our time isn’t left and right but surface and depth,” she says. “That’s been on my mind. Depth is what connects people. And the artists I work with have that depth.”
