Valerie Atkisson is a visual artist whose career has been profoundly influenced by her family history. Valerie has explored the stories, landscapes and lives of her ancestors through various artistic mediums, including painting, sculpture, mural and installation. Her work has been displayed, collected and cherished by individuals and museums throughout the United States.
Valerie's vision is to bring family histories to life. She will work with you, using your pedigree charts, stories, photographs, and other memorabilia to capture your ancestry in a work of art that will become a family treasure.
Contact Valerie to commission your own
unique family history art piece.
Oil painting commissioned by Dawn Rosquist based on high school senior portraits of herself, her mother and her grandmother, informed by other photographs and stories.
Hanging Family History is a three-dimensional map of Valerie's ancestry. Her vital information is written on the top triangle. Her parents' triangles are attached to her triangle. Their parents' are attached to them and so on for 72 generations, 2000 years going back to 9 A.D. The piece is made of copper wire and rice paper.
This piece wanders up the stairwell at a second house co-owned by Valerie's father and his sister. This ancestral piece illustrates their joint lines.
Patriarchal Line traces Valerie's patriarchal line back seven generations in the South through the Civil War to tobacco plantations.
Family in Norway is a wall painting of Valerie's Norwegian family history at the Queens Museum of Art. It is 80 feet long, 30 feet high and illustrates five generations of her great grandmother who immigrated from Norway to the U.S. in 1880.
This striking glass piece traces the Finlinson ancestry using a “shaker sampler” motif as if it is stitched into the glass. The original art and type is sandblasted into a plate of thick glass 18 inches by 36 inches.
This piece traces the artist's matriarchal line back 10 generations by landscape and portrait. The red flowers represent the female offspring each mother bore and the blue represent the males.
Valerie wrote out her entire known family history on the wall of Artist's Space in Manhattan during the three week exhibition. It took up 72 feet of wall space and many Sharpies.
Each copper rod contains the descendants and stories of one of my great grandparents kids.
Valerie collaborated with choreographer Marin Legget and composer Nathan Bowen to produce this show preformed at Merce Cunningham Studios in Manhattan.
Jungle Totem is a personal timeline of the artist's life. The watercolors are cut out at the bottom of the piece and less cut out at the top indicating past and future experiences.
This is a personal timeline of the artist's life past and future.
One of many on-sight watercolors Valerie does of landscapes. This watercolor is of the midnight sun at Alta Fjord, Norway.
Johnson Descendants traces Valerie's great-grandparents' descendants. Each person's vital information is listed with a graphite drawing of them. In some places there is so much visual information it is layered with attached rice paper cameos.
