Karen Lawrence is guiding a landmark renovation of the Huntington’s Library in San Marino, a project that will renew public exhibition galleries, expand collections storage and pull library and art museum staff into closer collaboration. The work also will establish a dedicated conservation center at the institution that draws 1.1 million visitors a year.
Lawrence has led The Huntington since 2018, after serving for a decade as president of Sarah Lawrence College and earlier as dean of U.C. Irvine’s School of Humanities. Her first academic job was as an assistant professor of English at the University of Utah, where she taught undergraduate and graduate literature and writing courses.
The Huntington’s scale gives the renovation uncommon weight. The institution sits on a 207-acre campus, employs 600 staff and sits at the center of a major cultural presence in San Marino, where the library, art museum and collections shape the visitor experience and the school program around them. The renovation fits broader efforts to expand access to the institution’s three collections and widen educational programming.
Lawrence’s career has been rooted in literature, and she has kept that bent in the way she talks about leadership. She cites Louis Pasteur’s line, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” and another favorite from George Eliot: “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” Her favorite book is Ulysses, and when she is not at work she likes going to the movies and taking Zumba.
She also has favorite places in and around the job. Agnes is her restaurant choice for fun, while The Athenaeum is where she prefers to meet for business. That mix of scholarly habit and institutional management helps explain why she has been the person asked to steer a renovation that is both practical and symbolic: the storage and conservation needs are real, but so is the chance to redraw how the Huntington’s library, art and research functions work together. Ralf Schumacher's first Formula 1 win in San Marino still resonates 25 years on, but at The Huntington the focus is on a different kind of legacy, one built for the next generation of visitors and researchers.
For the Huntington, the renovation is not just a building project. It is a reset for how a major cultural institution in San Marino shows its collections, protects them and invites the public in.
