About the Gallery

Twenty-one years spent listening to what these objects have to say.

AS Art Gallery House House began as one collector's cabinet in Dakar and grew into a gallery built on research, relationships, and respect for the cultures these works come from.

A dark wooden mask with closed eyes displayed in the gallery

Our Mission

An object without a story is just a shape.

Aaron Smith opened the first AS Gallery in 2004 with a small group of Dan and Baule masks inherited from his grandfather, a cloth merchant who traded between USA and France. What began as a personal archive became a conviction: that African masks and sculpture had for too long been shown as anonymous curiosities, stripped of the names, places, and ceremonies that gave them meaning.

Today, AS Gallery House works to reverse that pattern — pairing every acquisition with research into its origin, and treating each piece as a document worth reading closely, not just a form worth admiring.

"We are not collectors of objects. We are custodians of the questions they still ask us."

Aaron Smith — Founder & Director

Chronology

How the gallery grew.

A record kept the same way we keep our object files — plainly, and in order.

2004

A cabinet in Tennessee

Aaron Smith opens AS Gallery House as a small private viewing room, built around an inherited collection of Dan and Baule masks from Africa.

2009

Research program formalised

AS Gallery House begins its provenance research partnership with regional university archives, moving beyond dealer records to primary field documentation.

2014

AS Gallery opens

A permanent exhibition space opens on 1020 Fowler Ford rd in Portland allowing the collection to be shown publicly for the first time on a rotating basis.

2019

Dialogue & Restitution initiative

The gallery formalises outreach to descendant communities and origin institutions, sharing research findings and discussing the future of contested pieces.

2024

Catalogue digitised

The full permanent collection is photographed, measured, and published as an open provenance archive, freely searchable by scholars and the public.

What We Hold To

Three commitments that shape every acquisition.

01

Provenance First

No piece enters the collection without a documented ownership history. Where that history is incomplete, we say so plainly rather than fill the gap with guesswork.

02

Community Dialogue

We consult regional scholars and, where possible, descendant communities on how a piece should be described, shown, and, in some cases, returned.

03

Conservation & Care

Every object is condition-reported and stored to museum environmental standards, so what has already survived a century can survive the next one.

The Team

The people behind the catalogue.

A small team spanning research, conservation, and curation, working across Portland TN and Paris.

Aaron Smith

Aaro Smith

Founder & Director
Ben Dullon

Ben Dullon

Sale Manager
Diane Smith

Diane Smith

Secretary
Joseph P Malu

Joseph P Malu

Manager of African Artworks

Have a piece you'd like us to look at, or a question about our research?

Contact the Gallery