John Havens Thornton (1933 - 2021)
The late John Havens Thornton lived and worked in New Bedford, Massachusetts for forty years before his death at the age of eighty-seven in 2021. In 1963 he became professor of Art at the Massachusetts College of Art where he taught studio art and the philosophy of art until 1984. A selection of his exhibitions include: Robert Hamilton/John Havens Thornton - Selected New Paintings, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (1967), Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum, NY (1967), Solo exhibition, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA (1970), Visual Memoirs curated by Carl Belz, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (1979), Landscape as Metaphor: The Transcendental Vision, Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, MA (1993), Landscape as Metaphor: The Transcendental Vision, Newport Art Museum, RI (1994), Triennial, Fuller Museum of Art, Brockton, MA (1999), John Thornton Paintings: A Retrospective, New Bedford Art Museum, MA (2004), Line + Relation, John and Charles Thornton, Gelb Gallery, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA (2010).