Bruce Thorn (b. 1952, Chicago) is a first generation American from a multi-cultural background. He knew that he would be an artist from the first time he picked up a crayon.

​

The pictures kept coming, jumping out of his imagination. He earned a B.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975, having had the good fortune to study with Ray Yoshida.

​

Thorn earned an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1987. Martin Puryear, Dennis Kowalski, Phyllis Bramson, Susan Sensemann, Morris Barazani and Dan Ramirez were his graduate advisors. His thesis was titled “Ethereal Vibrations in the Visual Arts.”

​

In 1982, Thorn’s artwork was taken on by Zaks Gallery in Chicago. In his first showing there, a two-artist exhibition with Bruce Thayer in 1986, he exhibited painted mixed media constructions. By 1996, his solo exhibition at Zaks was all abstract painting.

​

Well into his career as a painter, in 2016 he took up an active interest in writing essays and reviews about art, which were published in Neoteric Art and the New Art Examiner from 2016 through 2019.

​

Bruce Thorn has maintained a vibrant art practice throughout his life. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Czechoslovakia, Canada and the Netherlands, and is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Ukrainian Institute of Art, Chicago, the Roger Brown Study Collection, Chicago, and the Flaten Art Museum in Northfield Minnesota.

​

​

Please click here to listen Bruce's original music on Bandcamp.