Recommendation to the Trustee of The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation
of the Selection Committee for the Foundation's 2024 Grant-Awards Program

It is with great pleasure that the Selection Committee of The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation's 2024 Grant-Award Program recommends Dennis Ashbaugh to the Trustee of the Foundation as the recipient of the Foundation's 2024 grant award. After thorough consideration of multiple candidates, the Selection Committee unanimously chooses to recognize Ashbaugh's distinguished multi-decade career—a career which has proven that the most enduring art does not succumb to the expectations of genre, but instead insists on its own internal logic, following a path paved first and foremost by the curiosity of its maker.

A luminously adept treatment of—and reverence for—his materials, starting from paint and moving outward, lays the groundwork for Ashbaugh's practice. Yet his decades of unique, often idiosyncratic, work with collaborators, ranging from William Gibson to Anna Wintour to computational genomicist Yaniv Erlich, all speak to an understanding that art need not hold back: it can be as big, roving, and omnivalent as the world it inhabits.

From earlier hard-edge shaped canvases drawing on Russian Constructivism, to his signature DNA-inspired works, to bug traps and playful anti-facial-recognition devices, to recent painted aluminum and carbon-fiber pieces, Ashbaugh's work has always revealed him to be an artist of the rarest kind: one who believes in dialogue with the successive movements of its time, and yet refuses to don the tidy, totalizing markers of said movements. Making work that resists categorization is not always easy, particularly when easy categories seem to steer so much of the collective attention paid to art from one decade to the next. But it is to the great benefit of the broader art-viewing public that Ashbaugh innovates to this day; a multivalent, ravenously intelligent oeuvre is the result.

The Selection Committee has determined that Dennis Ashbaugh and his prior artistic achievements best embody the spirit of individualism and independence of Barnett Newman as set forth in the Foundation's Statement of Criteria for Grant-Awards to Individuals dated April 12, 2004.