MORGANTOWN – She’ll take Manhattan, for sure.
With all that maternal pride and all that socio-geographic awe, there were times when Phyllis Stewart-Brown could only smile and shake her head.
“New York City,” she’d say. “That’s Ashley up there.”
Said daughter, Ashley Weldon Stewart Rodder, wasn’t just up there: She was owning it in the art world up there.
Ashley was a director at Gagosian, the city’s famed network of art galleries.
In that role, she worked closely with contemporary luminaries Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Stanley Whitney, Titus Kaphar and Deana Lawson.
When she wasn’t mentoring new artists just making their names and signature styles, she was overseeing exhibits in galleries from Beverly Hills, Paris, London and Athens, Greece.
Ashley, her mom said, loved and celebrated every brush-stroke of all of the above, with work ethic and vision made all the more notable by the fact that she had been in pain for the past four years or so.
The rare disease she had been diagnosed with was chronic, and then terminal.
She was just 42 when she slipped away Feb. 17, surrounded by family, friends and her husband, Felix Justus Rodder, a one-time arts and entertainment attorney inspired by his wife to open his own gallery.
Many of those friends were surprised she was sick. Which didn’t surprise her mother at all.
“Ashley didn’t want anyone to know,” Stewart-Brown said. “She was getting on airplanes and mentoring and doing everything she could – until she couldn’t.”
That credo, “doing everything she could,” was immortalized on local canvas during Ashley’s growing-up years in Morgantown.
She was earning accolades in dance – ballet, included – when she was still a kid.
Lacrosse was in her wheelhouse. So was basketball, track and softball.
She was on the youth board of the West Virginia Human Rights Commission and was crowned with a state community award as she sought the title of Miss Teen West Virginia (she was second runner-up).
“There wasn’t a lot of nonsense with Ashley,” her mother said. “She got things done. She set goals and achieved them.”
Not that she was a drudge. Her technical prowess in dance was equaled by her just-plain joy of the music and expression of the endeavor.
The Big Town beckoned with that scholarship she garnered that led her to Marymount Manhattan College in New York, and a degree in art history.
“I knew Ashley was smart and worked hard, but I was afraid that energy in the city was going to be too much for her,” her mother said. “I got that wrong.”
Through it all, she never lost her sense of place for Morgantown and West Virginia, Stewart-Brown said.
Appalachia kept peeking out from under all that Manhattan glitz and glamour.
That was once revealed in a fashion magazine piece about her. The writer was discussing the art leader’s wardrobe, which was light on designer labels and well-stocked with blue jeans and sneakers.
Her benchmarks for clothes-buying: “Do I need this or do I want this?” And, “Am I actually going to wear this, I mean, really?”
Phyllis called her “baby girl” and Ashley called Phyllis, “Moma.”
She was quietly loud in her courage and faith as her illness progressed, Stewart-Brown said.
Toward the end, she said, “Don’t worry about me, Moma. I’ve got God in my life.”
Which is another credo that now hangs in Stewart-Brown’s personal gallery of heart. Just like an heirloom painting.
“Make every minute count, because you don’t know how many you’re going to get in this life,” she said.
“Ashley taught me that.”
