For This Artist, It’s All About The Action
Ashley Longshore on her 16-hour work days and colourful pop feminism
Artist Ashley Longshore is not one to fret. Her remedy for worry can be summed up in a word. “Action,” she said. “Action is my cure for everything.” On this late winter day, she rose at 5.30am. “Mornings, as soon as my eyes open, I grab my phone, and on my way to the bathroom I instantly start emailing,” she said. “Then I pee, put on my Spanx, yank on my pearls, pop on some sunglasses, and it’s time to get rolling.”
Longshore, who boasts of working 16-hour days, doesn’t roll so much as churn, her copious output all but assaulting visitors to her storefront gallery on funky Magazine Street.
Greeting me was a larger-than-life portrait of model Kate Moss cloaked in a houndstooth patterned nun’s habit; a throw pillow stamped with the formidable visage of Anna Wintour; and a portrait of Jesus wearing a T-shirt and flanked by a pair of teddy bears. There was also a self-portrait of Longshore tricked out as a pleasingly chubby Wonder Woman.
Those shrilly colourful sculptures, paved with crystal and glitter, seem to wink from the walls or spring from the floor, a stretch of poured concrete slicked with garage paint in a naughty shade of pink. “It makes you feel happy the minute you walk in,” Longshore said. “Besides, I like the stimulation.”
Indeed, she thrives on it. Working outside the corridors of the mainstream art world, she has become an avatar of pop feminism to thousands of followers, who view and buy her work on her proudly profane Instagram feed, on her website and, most recently, in the rarefied precincts of Bergdorf Goodman in New York.
At the department store, introducing her installation there in January, Longshore, 46, lured a crowd of mostly young women scrambling for a chance to view the art and the artist, up close. They jostled, scarcely registering the presence of actress Blake Lively, one of Longshore’s most ardent collectors; designer Christian Siriano; and celebrity stylists including June Ambrose and Jenke Ahmed Tailly, who counts Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian as clients. Single-mindedly they snaked toward Longshore, who stood at the rear of the room dispensing hugs.
“I love her. She captures a lot of positive vibes,” said Cara Dimino, 24, a medical researcher from New York, as she threaded her way through the crush.
Lisa Burwell, the editor of Vie, a West Coast-based style and culture magazine aimed at 25- to 35-year-olds, called the artist “a pied piper of hope and fun”. The world, she said “just doesn’t have enough of that”.
BIRKIN BAGS AND DIAMOND BRACELETS
Ten days later, back in her studio and gallery, Longshore grinned nakedly. “Boy, did I freaking bring it,” she said. Her ardour, she knows, is infectious. “All those girls at the opening, I want them to feel, ‘This could happen to me too’,” she said, adding, with no trace of irony, “My greatest legacy is not my painting but sharing with them that feeling of endless possibility every day.” Longshore recently published a book, You Don’t Look Fat, You Look Crazy, a combination of self-help and memoir dense with her bawdy illustrations, rejoinders and briny aphorisms. “Just womanup,” she urges, interjecting curse words. “Put on your big-girl panties and deal with it.” Or, more philosophically: “No one should be devalued because of their genitalia.” Earlier this month an eye-popping blowup of her recent Vie Magazine cover loomed over Times Square. “No words!!! … No words to describe…,” she rhapsodised in an Instagram post.
A professed mega-consumer, she dotes on her Birkin bags, which, to those who can afford her work, may be part of her allure. “She is about living the good life, about high style,” said Alan Bamberger, an art consultant in San Francisco. “She says it’s OK to be lavish, to own expensive things. She doesn’t apologise.”
Longshore’s sparkly rings and Christian Louboutin shoes add some “lady” to her look, a brash hybrid of hip-hop star and high gypsy priestess. On this day she was wearing a tracksuit and hefty chain from which dangled a slab of agate bordered
in gems. Tiny diamonds glistened in her teeth, and a half-dozen jewelled tennis bracelets encircled her wrists, each, for the artist, an individual badge of success.
On this afternoon she sold five or six canvases, she said, adding that this was a typical haul, taking in a total of US$65,000 (2.1 million baht). Her patrons are an odd assortment of actors, well-heeled matrons, hedge-fund managers and scores of more modest believers in Longshore’s gospel.
“This is America,” she likes to preach. “Here, if you’re willing to work hard enough, you can look at yourself every morning, pinch your nipples and smile, and say goddamn it, ‘I can go out and do anything I need to do’.”
Often bearing cartoonlike images of accomplished, much-mythologized females — Wintour, Frida Kahlo and Audrey Hepburn among them — Longshore’s canvases are intended as testaments to female empowerment. “‘When you want a helping hand, look at the end of your arm’,” Longshore likes to say, quoting Hepburn, a longtime idol.
DEFINING ‘AMBITCHEOUS’
Conventional dealers may well look askance at her work, some dismissing it as tasteless or garish. “It is art that certainly could polarise,” Bamberger acknowledged. But these days, he said, “when you buy a work of art, you buy into the person, the whole package, and Instagram is where the whole package plays out”.
It doesn’t hurt, either, that Longshore is relentlessly upbeat, “The word ‘don’t’ doesn’t enter her vocabulary,” Bamberger said.
It wasn’t always so. In Montgomery, Alabama, where she grew up, “I was this weird kid who got picked on because I had a big voice and a loud personality,” Longshore recalled. But her mother had dreams for her, imagining Ashley at cotillion, fanning out her party dress and batting her eyes at the eligible boys.
“I was raised by the garden club, and my underwear had a monogram on it until I started my period,” Longshore said. “It would’ve been easier”, she writes in her memoir, “to dress pretty, fawn over those big-eared boys and learn my dance steps, but I couldn’t do it”.
She eventually decamped for Montana, where she taught herself to paint, and later New Orleans, a city she loves for its rawness. She peddled her earliest paintings — masturbating couples and the ribald like, to local galleries, and was mostly met with rejection. At night she sobbed, “crying snot bubbles”, she said. “I was let down by just being disrespected.”
Her tendency to go public with her triumphs and travails proved attractive. “People love all that blood, sweat and tears,” she said. Brands seem OK with it, too. For the Judith Leiber company Longshore created a 20-piece collection of sparkly rainbow-coloured evening bags. They sold out within 13 hours of being featured on Instagram, at $6,500 apiece. “Now that’s a lot of cheese,” Longshore said.
Showcasing artists in a retail environment is one way to draw online shoppers back to stores, suggested Roma Cohen, who sells upscale street wear at Alchemist, his concept store in Miami Beach. Cohen, who has initiated collaborations with Damien Hirst, Marina Abramovic and their influential like, and whose own fashion/music/art installation is on view at Bergdorf this week, added, “People like to feel they are getting an experience,” one that they’re inclined to photograph and share.
Longshore is well ahead of that game. On her social media platforms she exposes not just her art but her own perceived flaws: runaway carb cravings, a tendency to hoard and an unyielding competitive drive. She’s “ambitcheous”, Longshore acknowledged. Sorry, not sorry. “I’m brave enough to be who I am in a society where there’s a lot of pressure to be perfect,” she said.
There is no danger that she will succumb. An edge of defiance creeping into her voice, she recalled having dealt with overbearing Masters of the Universe. “When I get these hedge-fund guys in here, I know how to talk to them,” she said. “I’m not sitting here batting my eyes and smiling. I’m not about to be ground down.”