Artist Ashley Longshore leaves New Orleans for New York | Arts

A star is gone.

Ashley Longshore, one of New Orleans’ most renowned artists, has closed her Magazine Street gallery and is reopening in New York City. Plain brown paper covers the display windows in her former location at Cadiz Street, where her colorful pop paintings and sculptures used to beam. A note on the door reads: “The art and spirit of this city is forever in my heart. Thank you for everything.”

In a telephone conversation, Longshore explained that the possibility of opening a gallery in New York had been on her radar for some time. After all, many of the highlights of her career had taken place there.

Longshore’s loud, lush paintings were like memes on canvas. They playfully promoted celebrity, luxury, self-indulgence and, above all, self-reliance. Her public persona was as brassy and bawdy as Andy Warhol’s had been shy and reserved. New York loved her for it.

In 2018, she was given the opportunity to take over a section of the fashionable Bergdorf Goodman department store for an exhibit of her paintings, which led to an adoring 2018 New York Times profile in which she was dubbed “Fashion’s Latest Art Darling.”

Soon, legendary fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg enlisted Longshore to produce portraits of women, including Cleopatra, Marlene Dietrich, Rosa Parks and others, to decorate her anchor store. A feature followed on “CBS News Sunday Morning,” in which Longshore was crowned “the brash princess of paint.”

Longshore said she’s long rented an apartment in Manhattan, where she’s able to indulge her passion for Broadway theater. Her vague plans to relocate her gallery suddenly came into focus over the winter, when she noticed a three-story storefront available for rent in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. She said that seeing the space was “the same feeling as falling in love.”

She expects to move in August. One member of her Magazine Street staff plans to move to New York to work in the new space; others will work as part of a remote sales team, she said. 

“Is it scary?” Longshore said. “Yeah, it’s scary.” But, she said, New York is a global crossroads, where she might be able to tap into a much wider market than Magazine Street was able to provide.

Longshore, who was born in Montgomery, Alabama, opened her gallery on Magazine Street 15 years ago. It’s changed locations once.

She said she knew it was time to close this chapter of her career the same way a painter knows when a painting is finished.

“It’s all about a feeling,” she said. She said she needed New Orleans “weird bohemian funk” but now she craves something else. 

In 2020 Longshore was accused by a New Orleans social media opinionator of racial insensitivity for the content of some of her work. She described the episode as “heartbreaking” but said it did not influence her decision to move.

Her long-term vision, she said, is possibly to open a French Quarter gallery, once the Soho gallery is well established.

Sure, Longshore said, she’ll miss her Uptown spot. After all of her art had been moved out, she said, she walked around the empty gallery and “felt so much energy and love.” She said she recalled all of the patrons who’d come and gone, and the celebrities.

“People got engaged there,” she said, laughing. “Babies were probably conceived.”