Although Steve Ashby created idle carvings throughout his life in Delaplane, Virginia, it was only following his retirement as a farmhand and the death of his wife that he devoted himself to sculpture. Starting in the early 1960s, he created two main bodies of work of mostly human and animal figures. One was concentrated on small pieces cut from plywood, painted with model-airplane paint, and adorned with cast-off objects such as broken toys, saw blades, and bottle caps; the other was focused on large sculptures made from tree trunks and branches. He installed many of the almost-life-size figures of people in his yard, several of them dressed in his late wife’s clothing.
Born in 1904, Ashby was the second of twelve children in a family whose ancestors had been enslaved in this rural part of Virginia. A keen observer of his agrarian community, Ashby created sculptures—regularly including moving parts—that interpreted, with a dash of humor, its work and leisure. He adapted the American folk art tradition of wind-activated whirligigs for his portrayals of people milking cows, fishing, and doing laundry. Other kinetic works featuring women with hickory-nut breasts were bawdier, and even erotic; these he kept hidden inside his house. He also borrowed heavily from magazines and catalogs, often pasting faces cut from the pages onto the rough edges of the hand-sawn wood.
His assemblages, which he called “fixing-ups,” drew the attention of collectors about a decade after he had started filling his yard and home with these crudely formed yet inventive works. Before his death, in 1980, he was featured in the 1973 exhibition Six Naives at the Akron Art Institute. Although his art was a vivid reflection of the daily life around him, he claimed to be most inspired by dreams: “I wake up with an idea that won’t let me get back to sleep. So I get up and make that idea.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
This artist’s work was reviewed as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
