Uncovering the legacy of woodcarver Asa Ames
Colonial Williamsburg to display unique 19th century sculptures by WNY artist
He burned with artistic fire. But he lived a tough life, and died at a heartbreakingly young age.
Asa Ames was, in many ways, the James Dean of American folk art.
And he lived his entire life — just 27 years — right here in Western New York, in the Town of Evans, where today his simple slab tombstone lies toppled over in a country graveyard, crumbling and neglected.
When Ames died in 1851, of a “lung fever” that was probably tuberculosis, his family mourned him as a talented young carver who had enriched their lives with his sculptures in wood.
They had no way of knowing that Ames’ reputation would flower, a century and a half later, and that he would take his place among the nation’s foremost exemplars of figural carving in the mid-19th century.
“I really think that he stands alone,” said Stacy C. Hollander, senior curator at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, who recently organized the first major show of Ames’ work.
That exhibit, which features most of the 12 works by Ames known to exist, will open on Feb. 1 at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, and will be on view for nearly a year.
What makes Ames so special? There is, of course, his tragic life story, which has all the ingredients of great fiction: he sprang from nowhere, in a rural outpost near Buffalo, as a raw artistic talent; he produced much of his best work in his mid-20s; and he died at 27, just six months after he married a young local woman, Emma.
But that life history — while compelling — isn’t the real reason for Ames’ contemporary reputation, which is growing, art experts said, with every passing year.
Instead, they said, what matters most about Ames is the quality of his work: clean, pure, elegantly simple, detailed to the finest degree, and hauntingly personal.
Ames was carving in wood, at a time when figural sculpture in the United States was almost exclusively done in other materials, like marble and bronze. He was also carving his works in a rural settlement far from the centers of classic American art at the time, in New York and New England.
Today, to look at a sculpture by Ames is to forget that you are gazing at a chunk of wood and to instead find yourself contemplating a human figure that looks so individual, so vivid, and so meticulously shaped that it seems real.
“It’s very rare,” said Dana Tillou, a Buffalo art dealer who purchased one of the most famous of Ames’ carvings in 1975 from a family in the Southtowns. “They are not crude — there’s nothing crude about them. They are very refined, very sophisticated carvings.”
“These are the top of the line for folk art.”
A hard life
Ames was born to a rural family in sparsely settled Evans in 1824. His family didn’t have much money; in fact, records indicate that Ames himself lived with another local family for a period during his 20s, whether for financial reasons or health ones no one is certain.
But, Ames had several siblings and, like many country young people of his day, various cousins, nieces and nephews that lived in the surrounding area. Those family members, as well as some close friends, became the models for Ames’ art, experts today believe.
The simple fact that Ames was creating representations of real people separates his work sharply from other artists and sculptors of his day, many of whom created ideal figures rather than specific likenesses, experts said.
“It’s virtually unique,” said Hollander, of Ames’ subject matter and style. “The fact that Asa Ames was carving true portraits — three-dimensional portraits — is unique, outside of academically trained artists that were practicing in the country at the time.”
Finely detailed
After he honed his skills, Ames began producing lifelike sculptures of children and portrait busts — often, to commemorate people he knew, both living and dead.
One example of his work in this vein was discovered in 2004 in the basement of a museum in Colorado. That piece, “Susan Ames Hogue,” was one that Ames made of his niece Susan Ames, at about the age of 2, curator Laura Lee argued in an article in Folk Art magazine in 2005.
“The things that really made it stand out to me — that made me say, wow, this is really something — are the detailing on her pantaloons, the lace details around the edges, and the detail on the ears,” said Lee, who discovered the Ames piece while hunting for mannequins in the basement of the Boulder History Museum. “Ears are really hard to carve.”
The piece found by Lee, who has since left the Boulder museum, is part of the Ames exhibit that will open in Colonial Williamsburg in February.
Another major piece by Ames, uncovered in 1975 here in Western New York, is the sculpture of a child holding up a paten-like dish and cradling the head of a lamb. That major work, sculpted to commemorate the deaths of two little girls from Evans in May 1849, was made by Ames for the Ayer family, a farm family from Evans that he knew.
The work, “Memorial for Sarah Reliance Ayer and Ann Augusta Ayer,” was created by Ames out of yellow poplar and finished in 1850, just a year before he died.
That carving was the same one Tillou, the Buffalo dealer, purchased from the local family; he displayed it for a while in his own home, then in 1978 sold it to the Wadsworth Atheneum for, as he recalls, some $19,000.
Today, Tillou said, with Ames’ reputation growing exponentially, the same sort of figural carving might well be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ames today
Ames remains something of a puzzlement, even today, in his own home region.
At the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, curators have fielded questions for years about whether they own an Ames sculpture — a claim that was made in an exhibition catalog in New Jersey in 1931, and that has haunted the gallery by its inaccuracy ever since.
“We don’t own, nor ever have owned, that work,” said Maria Morreale at the Albright- Knox. “We’ve never owned any work by that artist.”
Meanwhile, in Evans, Ames’ simple slab gravestone lies toppled over in a roadside pioneer cemetery. He is not buried with his wife Emma, who moved to the Midwest after he died, nor with any other family members.
At least a few residents in the town who know a bit about Ames and his work want to see that situation remedied.
“The town could stand the gravestone up. Or give him a new one that you could read,” said Kevin Enser, a longtime Evans resident. “Maybe even a historical marker, to show that he’s there.”
“He’s a hidden treasure for Evans.”
SOME TIPS TO UNCOVERING ASA AMES’ WORK
You do the math. Town of Evans resident Asa Ames lived 27 years, including a period late in his life during which he actively worked as a self-described “sculptor” of human figures. And yet only a dozen or so of his works are known to exist.
Experts in art history, antique dealers and fans of Ames all agree: there must be more works out there that have survived down through the decades.
It’s just a matter of discovering them.
“I have to imagine there are other pieces out there,” said Stacy Hollander, curator of the recent Ames exhibit at the Folk Art Museum in New York City. “One never knows.”
Dana Tillou, the Buffalo art dealer who scored the biggest Ames find to date in Western New York when he purchased the carving of a child and lamb from a Southtowns family in 1975, agrees.
“I have a feeling they are out there somewhere,” said Tillou. “I think there could be one or two more.”
With that, we’re issuing a challenge to all who live in Western New York.
It’s time to scour your attics, barns and basements for any figural carvings that could be Ames’ work. Do you have a bust in your dining room that could be an original Ames? Maybe you do. What about that prized hand-me-down that your family has treasured for generations, even if it’s a bit dusty on a high shelf? Get it down and take a closer look.
And though an art expert would have to make the confirmation that any newly found sculptures are by Ames, there are a few telltale clues that amateur art sleuths can look for:
1.) The Ames signature.
Ames often signed his works by carving his name, in a distinctive, blocky script, somewhere on the piece, typically at the base or on the back of the figure. Sometimes he added a date, and in a few instances he added information about the subject of the work. One important Ames piece bears this inscription: “Amanda Armstrong, Born May 26, 1844, By A. Ames.”
2.) The Ames details.
No matter the subject, Ames’ works are characterized by a fine detail in carving of the tiniest details: the shape of an eye or ear, the ruffle on a child’s petticoat, the fold of a drapery. There is nothing gross or rough-hewn about his pieces, even in the components — the bases, pedestals, or reverse sides — that are less visible to the casual viewer.
3.) The Ames face.
In creating his works, Ames often relied on family members and friends who lived near him in Evans for his models and inspirations. Thus, his works have faces and hands that are stunningly lifelike, and that look — there is no better way to put it — like real people. These are not generic facial features, even though their expressions can be remote and otherworldly.
They seem to be alive, even 150 years after they were made.
— Charity Vogel
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