John Ashworth

Born in New York in 1939, painter/sculptor John Ashworth began appreciating art at the age of 8 while visiting seminal institutions such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art — as well as 57th Street galleries.

Two years later, his own work hung — with that of artists many years his senior — at Washington Square Park. Exhibition attendees purchased all of his hundreds of folded, Rorschach-type blots in poster paint on typing paper pasted onto vertical scrolls.

After moving to Massachusetts, where he graduated from high school in 1956, John pursued applied industrial physics at Wentworth Institute in Boston. From there, he majored in civil and structural engineering at Northeastern University and then attended Harvard University Graduate School of Design and, on scholarship, Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts.