Stuart A. Ashman is a sculptor and monotype printmaker working in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He's spent nearly five decades in the state's art world, first as a photographer, then as a museum and arts administrator, and now back at the workbench and the printmaking press.
Ashman earned a Bachelor of Art in Photography and Fine Art from the City University of New York and did graduate work at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied under the photographers Paul Caponigro and Minor White. That early training gave him an eye for form and texture that still shows up in his sculpture and prints today.
His sculpture pulls from the raw, unschooled energy of folk and outsider art: assembled, intuitive pieces that favor presence over polish. His monotypes work in a similar spirit, improvisational and one of a kind, shaped as much by the accidents of the printmaking process as by planning. Both bodies of work come from someone who's spent a lifetime paying attention to how people make things when no one's grading the results, the same instinct that's driven his decades of championing folk and self-taught artists as a curator.
That curatorial career is its own story. Ashman has been Director of the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, Secretary of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs under Governor Bill Richardson, President and CEO of the Museum of Latin American Art, director of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, and since 2018, CEO of the International Folk Art Market. In 2022, he and his wife, potter Peggy Gaustad, opened Artes de Cuba, a Santa Fe gallery focused on contemporary Cuban art, bringing him back to the country and the artists of his youth.
It's that combination, a working artist's hand, a curator's eye, and a life spent close to folk and outsider traditions, that gives Ashman's sculpture and monotypes their character. Hemmings Gallery is proud to represent an artist whose work reflects a lifetime spent looking, making, and championing art in every form it takes.
