Discipline: Visual Art

Elizabeth Harington

Discipline: Visual Art
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 1990
More: elizabethharington.com
Elizabeth Harington has committed most of herself to art, music, and etching. Her formal education began under Charles Argent at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. During the course of this early education, young Harington was honored as the most talented university Art student and awarded a commission to create a frieze for the South African Arts Festival in 1956.This full-featured frieze may have been the beginning of her career but for the political climate: This early creativity was censored by the government. The 100-foot X 6-foot fresco, completed after three months, exposed the struggle and constraint of tortured figures against a twisted rope spanning the entrance to the Great Hall. Before the festival opened, the frieze was torn down from its place of honor. This dashed opportunity for national recognition became a personal disillusionment, and the masterpiece has now passed into the vestiges of time.

Studios

Putnam

Elizabeth Harington worked in the Putnam studio.

The Graphics Studio (as it was originally named) was converted to its present use in 1972–1974 through a grant from the Putnam Foundation, and originally served the property as both a power house and pump house. Well water was pumped from a large cistern to Hillcrest, the Foreman’s Cottage, and the lower buildings closer to…

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