LaMar Harrington, art curator, dies at 87

PORT TOWNSEND, Wash. – LaMar Harrington, an art museum curator known for bringing bold, contemporary works to the Northwest, has died.

She was 87 when she died Wednesday at Jefferson General Hospital in Port Townsend after a brief illness.

An Iowa native, Harrington moved to the Northwest in 1941 with her husband, Stanley, and their daughter. The couple ran a grocery store in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and she studied music at the Cornish School for the Arts until the family moved to Bellevue.

In 1951, she volunteered at the Pacific Northwest Arts Fair, which she once said was the genesis of her passion for the visual arts.

Harrington earned a bachelor’s degree in art history at the University of Washington in 1957, the same year she started working at the university’s Henry Art Gallery. She planned exhibits, seminars and workshops and eventually became the Henry’s associate director.

“Her commitment to craft exhibitions and contemporary art at Henry was very, very strong,” said director Richard Andrews.

In 1972, the museum received a Governor’s Award for diversity and innovation, which was credited to Harrington’s “dedicated, imaginative guidance.”

“She was a spark plug,” Andrews said. “She had this open-minded energy for what was happening now. She was always living in the present.”

Harrington left the Henry and became a curator at the Archives of Northwest Art for the university’s Suzzallo Library, retiring for the first time in 1978.

She was recruited to be the struggling Bellevue Arts Museum’s director and chief curator in 1985. She brought the museum out of the doldrums. One of the exhibitions she brought there was “Frank Lloyd Wright: In the Realm of Ideas.”

“It was a big gamble to take,” said local developer Kemper Freeman Jr. “We beat the Seattle Art Museum attendance figures that year.”