Ancestry Magazine

Forget trees. When it comes to family history, mixed media artist Valerie Atkisson relies on everything from paper clips to tanned goat skin to celebrate her family history.

“I wanted to bring life into the raw, vital information that you get from genealogical research,” says Atkisson. “I noticed that I had a lot of information as far as stories and anecdotes and landscapes that brought these people back to life for me.”

Valerie’s appreciation for family history began when she was a young child. Her parents took her on trips to visit places where her ancestors were from and told her family stories that had been passed down through generations. When she was five, Valerie’s mother had her and her five siblings illustrate a family book about some of the stories. This, Valerie says, may have been the inspiration she needed to take on family history as a major theme for her art.

While studying art at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Valerie decided to tackle her own “self-portrait” by writing the names of all her known ancestors on the wall of her studio. What she thought would be a weekend project ended up taking all summer—the more she researched, the more the names piled up.

Eventually Valerie’s self-portrait project turned into the Family History Wall, displayed in Artists Space Gallery in New York City. The work contained all the names of Atkisson’s known ancestors—thousands of them. And because Valerie had discovered 72 generations of names the piece took up 72 feet of wall space—two rooms and five walls. It took her over five weeks to complete the gallery install.

Later, Valerie decided she wanted to see what this piece would look like in 3-D. She began by writing her name, birth date, and birthplace on a triangular piece of rice paper and used copper wire to attach it to triangles with her mother’s and father’s information. This continued until she had created a hanging sculpture nine feet tall, one that continued back for 2,000 years to 9 A.D. “Obviously there are errors in that,” Valerie says, “but the point of the piece was just to recognize how many people make me up. And whether they are known or unknown, everyone has a vast amount—thousands—of people that they come from.”

That same information, Valerie says, would take on a unique shape for any individual—their own self-portrait. The hanging version of Valerie’s self-portrait, Hanging Family History, hung in the D.U.M.B.O. Arts Center in New York City as well as in a downtown building in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics.

Valerie continues to turn to family history as a major theme in her work, whether she’s creating a mural representing her great-grandmother’s journey to America from Norway or painting her patriarchal line on a wall. “I feel like the heart of my work is the global family and the value of each life,” Valerie says. “And I feel like the family history work has been the metaphor in which I communicated that.”