Thornton Willis

Biography

Thornton Willis was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1936. He studied at the University of Southern Mississippi (B.A., 1962) and the University of Alabama, where he earned an M.A. in studio art in 1966 under the painter Melville Price. He began teaching in 1967 at Wagner College on Staten Island.

His early Slat paintings, made wet into wet on unstretched canvas, placed him among the lyrical abstractionists; his painting Wall (1969) was shown at the Aldrich Museum in 1970 and acquired by the Whitney Museum in 1971. Over five decades he worked in series: Wedges, Triangles, Lattices and, from 2013, Step paintings. His work is often described as a meeting of gestural abstraction and geometric structure.

He showed at Paley and Lowe, Sidney Janis and Elizabeth Harris galleries, among others, and was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 survey of recent painting and sculpture. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1979), National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in painting and printmaking, and grants from the Gottlieb and Pollock-Krasner foundations. His work is in collections including MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Phillips Collection.

At Holland Tunnel Gallery he took part in the Delft Blues ceramics project and showed paintings with Bix Lye's sculpture in Matter of Fact (2022). He died in Manhattan in June 2025.

Practice. Abstract painting in extended series built from simple units (slats, wedges, triangles, lattices, steps), pairing geometric structure with loose, visible brushwork and saturated color.