![]() ![]() In the years since its installation in 1959, Willis’s Welcome sign-along with the myriad trinkets upon which it is reproduced-has been readily consigned to the aesthetic category of kitsch: the morass of the tasteless and trashy, the entertaining and unserious. They have shone brightly since the 1950s, illuminating those who’ve toiled in this wired oasis set upon a Nevadan basin, and been captured in millions of pictures that circulate so widely beyond it. Women neglected by art history are legion, but the scale of the discrepancy in this case was striking: Willis had created one of the most famous images in the world, yet so little has been written about her, her signs, or their inimitable, high-watt legacy. Back home in London, I began to see Willis’s design everywhere: plastered to the window of a decrepit internet café, on the facade of a low-cost pizza joint that adopted her central bulb-lined casing, printed on the washed-out T-shirt of a weary young blonde serving drinks in a theater bar. Willis was mentioned by a volunteer guide, and my ears pricked at the detail of a woman’s name I’d never heard connected to a body of work I already knew. I went to the Neon Boneyard, part of the Neon Museum, a fenced lot on the outskirts of town where retired neon signs were stacked deep along the edges. I saw Betty Willis’s sign over a decade ago on a trip to Las Vegas. Suspended as if without a scaffold, this lit object appears as an image that has, for over sixty years, solicited many more. ![]() Late every day, the sign is enclosed by darkness. Above it is a crowning neon star, flashing orange to red. Below it, to, followed by Fabulous, painted in bedroom-blue cursive. Across it, a series of discs spell Welcome, each letter inscribed in red neon. Its white plastic casing, which sits high on twin blue stilts, is cut into a dilated diamond shape lined with bulbs. ![]() The Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign stands on Las Vegas Boulevard, four miles south of the city, in an area called Paradise. ![]()
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