Billy Schenck

One of the originators of the Western Pop Art movement, Billy Schenck incorporates techniques from photorealism with a Pop Art sensibility to both exalt and poke fun at images of the West. Schenck is known for utilizing cinematic imagery reproduced in a flattened, reductivist style, wherein colors are displayed side-by-side rather than blended or shadowed. In the August 2014 issue of Southwest Art magazine, his work was described as “a stance . . . a pendulum between the romantic and the irreverent.”

Schenck’s artwork is now in 56 museum collections, including the Albuquerque Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, Booth Western Art Museum, Briscoe Western Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, the Mesa Southwest Museum, Museum of the Southwest, New Mexico Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Tucson Museum of Art. Private collections include those of Laurence Rockefeller, Sylvester Stallone, and the estates of Malcolm Forbes and Fritz Scholder. Corporate collections include American Airlines, IBM, Sony, and Saatchi & Saatchi.

With over 115 solo shows in the U.S. and Europe, career highlights include the Briscoe Western Art Museum’s 2018 Andy Warhol: Cowboys and Indians and Billy Schenck: Myth of the West retrospective, Denver Art Museum’s 2011 Western Horizons, and the 2013 Utah Museum of Fine Art’s exhibition Bierstadt to Warhol: American Indians in the West.

A genuine cowboy himself, Schenck is a ranch-sorting world champion and the proprietor of the Double Standard Ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico, his home for the past two decades.

Billy Schenck is represented by Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Castle Fine Art, London, Manchester, Leeds, and Cambridge, England; Felder Gallery, San Antonio, Texas; InSight Gallery, Fredericksburg, Texas; JoAnne Artman Gallery, Laguna Beach, California, and New York City; Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona; Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, Arizona; Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, California; Modern West Fine Art, Salt Lake City, Utah; Tambaran 2 Gallery, New York City; and Visions West Contemporary, Denver, Colorado, and Bozeman, Montana.

You can view Billy Schenck's Artist Salon for 2021 Masters of the American West HERE.

View the Autry’s interview with Billy Schenck here. Recorded live January/2023.