Village Savant™

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WORKS/SAN JOSE
Presents "Ray’s World: an overwhelming look at Ray Ashley’s passion for art "

Opening January 5 - January 28, 2006
Works/San Jose 30 North 3rd Street
San Jose, CA (408) 295-8378
Reception: 7 to 9pm, Friday January 6th

Special Event Thursday, January 12, 5:30-7pm, casual talk by local museum and gallery staff on Ashley's collection, or individual artworks from the collection

Artists have always collected the works of other artists, acquiring them sometimes through purchase, sometimes though trades. Art that we live with helps us learn as well. Matisse and Picasso traded and scrutinized each other's work and thereby goaded each other into innovation. Gustave Caillebotte and Paul Gauguin both collected Impressionist work as they commenced their own careers.

Rarely, however, does the collecting bug succeed on such a scale as it has with Ray Ashley, a Bay Area artist and disabled Vietnam War vet, who has become a kind of patron saint to his fellow South Bay artists. Living frugally, driving an old car and wearing old clothes, Ashley has purchased thousands of artworks at auctions — including Works' annual fund-raiser — sometimes at bargain prices. "If you see something you want, get it no matter what," he advises. Over the past twenty-five years he has amassed a huge collection which now covers "every possible surface" of his San José home, and then some "so much art that he cannot see most of it," says Curator Sarah Puckitt. Along with Monica Tucker, her colleague at History San José, she has taken on the daunting tasks of cataloguing the collection and preparing this exhibition numbering approximately one hundred fifty pieces selected from the collection. "A veritable who's who in the South Bay art scene," it's a tribute as well to a local hero, a collector of conviction who has unwaveringly followed his aesthetic passion: "Only get what you really want and enjoy. Buy it forever." Whatever the collection's current financial valuation — Ashley is famously indifferent to the numbers — we are all the richer for his enthusiasm and generosity.

The artists include, among many others:
Tony Bustamonte
Prentiss Cole
Kathryn Dunlevie
Robert Eads
David Gilhooley
Erin Goodwin-Guerrero
Gronk
Wayne Jiang
Katherine Levin-Lau
Will Nelson
Eve Page-Mathais
Lee Petty
Lisa Ramirez
Robert Rauschenberg
Kim Rifreds
George Rivera
Glen Rogers
Joe Saxe
Randy Shiroma

Contact: Sarah Puckitt, Curator
408-286-6172
puckitt@sbcglobal.net
(photos available)

DeWitt Cheng, Works Publicity Coordinator
415-412-8499 (cell)
acdcmr@earthlink.net

Jennifer Levy, Works Gallery Coordinator 408-295-8378
works_sj@yahoo.com

Established in 1977, Works/San José is a non-profit, volunteer-run contemporary art and performance center dedicated to providing a venue for artists, ideas, and images that expand the scope of cultural and artistic experience.