Painter and art educator Ellsworth Augustus Ausby was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1942. Ausby moved to New York and attended both the School of Visual Arts, the American Art School and the Pratt Institute where he earned a BFA. Ausby's hybrid painting embraced African imagery, AfroFuturism and geometric abstraction. In 1974, Ausby married artist Jamillah Jennings, with whom he founded Nefer International Gallery based out of their Brooklyn home. Ausby's paintings were including in a number of significant museum exhibitions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the 1969 New Black Artists, Brooklyn Museum and the 1970 Afro-American Artists, New York and Boston, the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He had his first solo exhibition at Cinque Gallery, New York in 1970. Ausby participated in the 1977 African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Nigeria. In 2005, he received an commission from the MTA to design the stained-glass mural Space Odyssey at the Marcy Avenue subway station in Brooklyn. Ausby taught painting at the School of Visual Arts from 1979 until his death in 2011. In 2023, the Houston Museum of African American Culture held the artist's first retrospective Ellsworth Ausby: Odyssey. His work today is found in the permanent collections of the Menil Collection, Houston and the Saint Louis Art Museum.
