Born 1904, died 1980, Delaplane, Virginia

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.

Assemblages of found materials such as plywood, lumber, scraps of hardware, discarded children’s toys, and photographs, Ashby’s “fixing ups,” as he called the...