The exhibition "Asa Ames: Occupation Sculpturing," on view at the American Folk Art Museum through September 14, presents a unique and colorful slice of 19th-century folk art. The exhibit was organized by Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator and director of exhibitions, at the museum.
"Asa Ames: Occupation Sculptu-ring" is the first exhibition devoted to the three-dimensional portraits carved by the elusive and tragic artist between 1847 and his death in 1851. The artist's sculpture has been written about, published, and seen individually in group exhibitions, but the American Folk Art Museum's presentation is a unique opportunity to examine eight of his twelve known sculptures in an intimate, jewel-like installation. Although Asa Ame's body of work was small, this exquisite group of polychromed carvings in wood, on loan from public and private collections, represents some of the most beautiful and sensitive American sculptures of the mid-nineteenth century.
Asa Ames (1823-1851) immortalized family members, neighbors and friends in the vicinity of Evans, Erie County, New York. Included in the artist's small collection are portraits of young men and women, and children. Sensitively portrayed as either life size bust-, waist-, or full-length figures, they have few antecedents in early American folk sculpture because of the private nature of the portraits. Like much portraiture of the day, the representations are iconic in their pared-down simplicity and absolute frontality, lending to the air of timelessness that permeates the carvings.
The life-size, full-length figure of Susan Ames, carved in 1849, depicts the artist's niece, his brother Henry's daughter. As in all his work, Ames accurately described details and texture of clothing and hair through precise carving and the application of paint. In this regard, it resonates with conventions of painted portraiture. However, as a fully realized volumetric sculpture, it occupies space and sheds light on the gestures that are often seen in folk portraits of children. The roundness of the child's face hints at her young age - she was barely two when the sculpture was carved. Her piercing blue eyes distinguish the girl from her brown-eyed cousins. This sculpture moved west with the family and was recently rediscovered in the Boulder History Museum where it had been placed in the 1960's by Mrs. Arch Hogue, Sr. Susan Ames married Joe Hogue in Edgar County, Illinois, in 1864. They later moved to Colorado.
One of the most intriguing sculptures in the American Folk Art Museum's collection is the startling waist-length woodcarving of a child in a pleated red dress with phrenological markings on her head. Phrenological Head was probably carved around 1850, during the time that Ames lived in the household of Dr. Harvey B. Marvin, a physician and practitioner of alternative therapies. The carving has the specificity of a portrait. The deeply carved puffed sleeves contrast with the rhythmic linearity of the pleated bodice and skirt. The child's impassive expression becomes a blank canvas for the phrenological map that is marked on her head, closely following the chart popularized by the Fowler brothers.
Ames' work is usually discussed within the genre of ship and trade figure carving. His own sense of himself as an artist may be gleaned in the Federal Census of 1850, where his occupation is listed as "sculpturing." This has prompted a consideration of his art within a broader framework of sculpture traditions, from Renaissance marble busts, primarily of male children, to classical-inspired marble statuary in the Italianate tradition by Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, to those associated with the rural cemetery movement that was burgeoning in the 1840s.
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