“Steve Ashby lived his entire life in a small town in Virginia, an unincorporated community roughly fifty miles west of Washington, DC. The son of an emancipated slave, he was the second of twelve children. Outside of a brief stint as a restaurant waiter, Ashby spent most of his life working the soil as a farmer and gardener until he retired in 1950. Although he had tinkered with small-scale wooden sculptures throughout his life, it was only after the death of his wife in 1960 that he started to experiment with figural sculptures.–National Gallery of Art“
