Willem Volkersz.com
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"High art and low culture need each other to renew their vitality--without each to enhance the other, both would fall flat." Donald Kuspit, American Ceramics, Jan/Feb 1999
The View from Here, South Dakota Art Museum, November 2021
Willem Volkersz came to the United States from his native Holland in 1953. While attending Garfield High School in Seattle, he bought a 4"x5" Crown Graphic camera and set up a photography business; he also worked for an interior design firm.
On motor scooter and car trips along the West Coast, he became enamored with American popular culture. Over time, he documented 1000's of billboards and neon signs, examples of eccentric vernacular architecture and folk art environments.
He began to collect paint-by-number paintings, postcards and kitschy travel souvenirs which eventually became part of the visual vocabulary with which he tells the stories of his boyhood, emigration, travel and life in the West.
"Many artists during [the 1960's] were influenced by the neon signage they encountered in the urban landscape...Only Volkersz' use of neon was personal and narrative." Kim Koga, Director, Museum of Neon Art, in Domestic Neon exhibition catalog, 2002
The artist's work has been featured in 50 solo exhibitions and more than 200 group shows in the US, Canada, England, Scotland, China and Taiwan. His work is in numerous corporate, museum and private collections. He has taught at Ohio State University, Leeds College of Art (England), the Kansas City Art Institute and Montana State University, where he also served as Director of the School of Art for six years.
Domestic Neon was selected as the featured exhibition for 3rd, 4th, or 5th graders for their annual gallery visit in Bozeman, Missoula and Helena. The artist especially enjoys doing guided tours for students of this age.
The artist and his wife have traveled extensively to collect and document American folk and outsider art. Work from their collection has been loaned to many museums and has traveled throughout the US (Word and Image in American Folk Art [1986], and The Radiant Object [1994]. The collection has now found permanent homes at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, Wisconsin), the Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, Montana) and the Hallie Form Museum of Art, Willamette University, Salem, Oregon.