Rolon Bert Garner was having trouble breathing when I interviewed him over the phone two years ago. He was at home on Whidbey Island. I was at home in Ballard. I remember the night—it was one of those Seattle rainy nights, cold and dark. This was when he was available. I was supposed to be with my family, but I just wanted to keep listening to him talk. (So will you: Read "An Interview with Art History Itself: The Painter, Champion, and Designer Rolon Bert Garner.")

He'd been through so much and didn't know how much time he had left, he told me, but he laughed and joked while he described his life, even the hard parts. After more than an hour, I thanked him for taking the time to talk for so long when it was hard to breathe. His parting words to me were, "You take care, because that’s the most important thing. Y’all be careful now."

Garner, who went by "Bert" and who was born in January of 1940, died this morning. He was 75.

"The passing of a legend," Mike Hascall wrote in an e-mail chain among Garner's friends today. I asked him for more.

"Bert was the technical talent Artech was founded on," he wrote. "He had worked for Dr. Fuller at SAM and at the Portland Art Museum as well. He did all the shows for Don Foster and Mrs. Greathouse at the Frye. He was an artist first and he pushed a lot of buttons. One of my favorite memories was going with him to Safeco Insurance in the days when men were required to wear white shirts and they went to coffee break on a bell, like recess. Bert had pink hair and was wearing a spiked dog collar and there were many cases of whiplash in the cubicles that day."

Garner had been diagnosed with COPD and congestive heart failure a decade before we spoke—just after he nursed his young wife through the better part of a decade of two kinds of cancer, only to have to help her die.

They'd owned Two Bells Tavern in Belltown together for 20 years, a place that in the 1980s was the heart of downtown Seattle alt-culture, and he'd either founded or helped establish many of the best things that happened in Seattle art in the 1970s and 1980s: Bumbershoot, and/or, Artech. He was a performance artist and painter himself, and his performances were legend (talking about them caused me, in our interview, to put to him the unexpected question, "Who owns the penis?"), but he spent most of his energy showing other artists. Around 1,000 in all, if you add them up.

That's why Garner's influence on the arts in Seattle was "immense," but "much of it barely visible," wrote Patrice Demombynes, owner of the Virginia Inn down on First Avenue, Seattle's first art bar.

"When the call went out for volunteers to install major exhibitions like the early Artwork for AIDS, it was Bert who picked up the phone and rallied helpers who would work all night to get it done," Demombynes e-mailed. "In the ’70 and ’80s, the art exhibitions were a much bigger part of Bumbershoot, organized, designed and installed by Bert and crew. Do we know that he initiated the first (to my knowledge) 'guerrilla art exhibitions' in temporary spaces (reference The Hillclimb Show), which spawned other hit-and-run spaces as well as Potatohead Gallery and Roscoe Louie? Ever heard of The (Seatttle) Salon des Refusees” at the Two Bells and The V.I.? [That was critic] Matthew Kangas's idea, but it would not have happened without Bert. Bert is responsible for the art in both of those taverns, but more than that, he made it okay to put art in taverns, restaurants, hair salons, etc. That may be the biggest influence that he has had beyond his mentorship of other artists."

In the '80s, Garner and Demombynes ran a gallery that was meant to be a pop-up—what Demombynes calls a "hit-and-run"—but it went on for a year and a half, "and showed artists that would not otherwise have had a venue."

Garner was "generous and a friend to all struggling artists in town," Hascall wrote.

"Well said, Mike," Anne Focke added to the e-mail chain. "And a legend who showed so many of us the value of a community and the role humor played in helping it hang together."

Demombynes mistyped Garner's first name over e-mail—"Rollon," rather than "Rolon"—and he wrote back to correct the mistake. "It's not 'Rollon,'" Demombynes wrote, "even though he adopted it from his nom de plume: Rolon Columbia [as in Roll On, Columbia!]; that was about the time he got the Space Needle tattoo and dyed his hair purple so he would blend in with Andy Warhol—one of his heroes—the year [Warhol] came to Bumbershoot. The '70s."

Friends lined up to add their remembrances. They were "shell-shocked," said Bob Teeple, because even though Garner had been sick and even recently in the hospital, he was just so alive.

"He was definitely a character," Teeple said by phone when I called this afternoon. I asked him if he knew Garner's birthday, and he went looking through some files he's keeping—on friends who he's worried could die soon.

Garner embodies an entire era. "He was definitely a major part of the Seattle art scene during the '60s, '70s, and even beyond," Teeple said, adding that many of his favorite stories about his old friend "are unprintable."

Garner's blazing eccentricity didn't keep him from being great at his work. Buster Simpson wrote, "Bert could have held court at the Oddfellows Cafe and Bar today, just as well as he did 40 years ago at the same location when the place was called and/or and where he helped install Chris Jonic's and my installation. He was as incredibly professional installing artists' work as he was making his own, and all served up with witful commentary."

Memorial services are still being planned, Teeple said, but Garner wanted "a big party, just like they had for Patricia [Ryan]," Garner's beloved wife.

In the meantime, to pay tribute to Garner, you can read that interview and imagine him warming that cold 2013 night, visit the Frye to see a show of Polaroids by Warhol, that hero of Garner's, or just sit and have a drink surrounded by the wood and the memories down at the Virginia Inn.