Nancy Hemenway (Whitten) Barton, of Washington, D.C. and formerly of West Boothbay Harbor and Southport, passed away peacefully in her sleep on Feb. 23, after a 15-year decline from Alzheimer’s. She was married to Robert Barton, a U.S. diplomat and childhood friend on Sept. 26, 1942.
She was born in Boothbay Harbor on June 19, 1920, the second of five children of Marion Dix and Robinson Whitten.
Valedictorian of Foxboro (Mass.) High School in 1937, she received a full music scholarship to Wheaton College and graduated in 1941. She was honored with a Doctor of Fine Arts Degree in 1983. She did graduate work in music composition at Harvard’s School of Music and received a master’s degree in Spanish lyric poetry from Columbia University in 1966, where she wrote her thesis on Nobel Prize winner Juan Ramon Jimenez.
In 1966, Nancy began to work in the rich textiles of the Andean region, the start of an original art form she called “bayetage”, textile wall hangings.
Under the auspices of the Bolivian government she became the first U.S. artist to have a solo show at the Pan American Union in Washington. It became the subject of a United States Information Agency film (1970).
Her works are in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Farnsworth Museum of Maine, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and many other public and private collections.
She lectured, held workshops and exhibited her art in Africa as the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship (1979-80), was an artist in residence at the Cummington Community in Massachusetts (1981), the Djerassi Foundation in California (1985), and a fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1989). In 1979 she was given the Deborah Morton Award from Westbrook College.
This past year, Hemenway Foundation published the first collection of 150 of her nature- and family-inspired poems in Abundance.
A lifelong summer resident of West Boothbay Harbor, she had homes in recent decades in Southport and Washington, D.C. She spent her last years at Sunrise in Washington, D.C.
Surviving are her husband, Robert, of Washington, D.C.; three sons, Bradford of Darien, Conn., William and wife Lisa of Ponte Vedra, Fla., and Frederick and wife Kit Lunney of Washington, D.C.; seven grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; and a step-great-grandchild; sister, Harriet McGillivray; and brothers, George Charles and Brad Whitten; many nieces and nephews; and dear friends Jesus A. and Jorge Mendoza.
Celebrations of Mrs. Barton’s life will be held 11 a.m., Sat., April 5, at the Palisades Community Church in Washington, D.C. and Aug. 2 or 3 in the Boothbay region.
In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to: the Marion Dix Whitten Scholarship at Wheaton College, the Boothbay Region Land Trust, the Juniper Point Village Improvement Society of West Boothbay Harbor; and the Hemenway Foundation (Florida).
