The Sturgis Motorcycle Museum & Hall of Fame is featuring Hall of Fame Highlights of this year’s outstanding new group of inductees. We took the opportunity to sit down with this year’s Hall of Fame inductees to talk with them about their career highlights and influences on the motorcycle industry over the years. We asked our inductees a handful of questions and this month we are highlighting world famous sculptor and artist, Jeff Decker, here is what he had to say:
SMM: What does being a Hall of Famer mean to you?
JD: In regards to a Sturgis Museum Hall of Famer it’s interesting because it is the first rally I ever attended consecutively for years that had to do with the people who loved motorcycles passionately today. I came from vintage racing, from history, from the aesthetic of the motorcycle so I really did meet a whole caliber of people, different types of people than I ever met before, so it is neat to be recognized by a crowd that without Sturgis I would never be familiar with.
The first time I put my bronzes out, I remember people asking me, “that is a bicycle”, “why does it have pedals”, “why is it so skinny”, “why did they put a motor in a bicycle”. I didn’t realize that these people love motorcycling because it was transportation and a mode of entertainment that was modern.
I was really in love with the history and the aesthetic, so the fact that a Sturgis Rally museum would recognize me, means that we have crossed a bridge and that we have come together and welcomed me, because I didn’t come from where the Rally came from.
SMM: What would you like to see in future Hall of Famers?
JD: I remember when the Hall of Fame and the AMA and the Sturgis Hall of Fame were one, I was on the committee early on and it seemed like racers got recognized, new and old racers got recognized. Titans of industries got recognized and usually they were donors or participants in the motorcycling community that made them be high profile.
I would like to see people that are oddballs. So when you feel like an outlier, you feel like an artist, you are the only guy that makes bronze sculptors and you are on the fringes but people see that you are significant and should be of note and they recognize you, I would like to see those outliers. I like to see those people on the fringes of the motorcycle community, not the obvious, not the expected. Those are the type of people that I would think we would search for and recognize.
SMM: What got you started in the industry?
JD: There was a guy named Stanley Wanlass, and I was an art major and interested in art, and he sculpted the automobile and so I thought, based on my mentorship with him, I wanted to do this quest for speed.
I grew up around the automobile primarily, and my dad actually frowned upon bikers, it was kind of a funny thing, but he helped them keep their bikes running. So, I started sculpting this thing, and it was “Quest for Speed”, it was an automobile, a boat and a motorcycle and when I got to the motorcycle I realized that it was the quintessential vehicle to represent this paradigm shift between the horse and the combustion motor, you straddled it.
You rode it like that, so it looked like a horse and the body contorts over the machine, it doesn’t go inside the machine. That is the thing that the car and the boat and the airplane lack is that you do go inside the machine, but you go on a motorcycle so it is much better.
I would set up at these really oddball events, primarily automobile events. Willie G. Davidson loves the automobile as well as the motorcycle and he would come to these events and he would buy weird things from me, little shift knobs or hood ornaments and he really won’t use them for a shift ornament or a shift knob, he would keep them as little desk pieces and then when I started doing the motorcycles, his wife would buy them, his sons would buy them, his daughters would buy them and it seemed like every major birthday or Christmas, Willie G. Davidson was getting these pieces and along with a clientele that I was building up in mass, but I wasn’t familiar with the art program that Harley Davidson endorsed.
They endorsed a gallery, not really artists, and they were painters and Willie extended that opportunity to me. I had already sculpted a half-dozen motorcycles as of then and that I was probably my big break. When I decided that I did not want to take on the licensing of Harley underneath that gallery, but I said if you give it to me proper I would do it and they sent me this phone book sized contract, I never read it.
Weeks later I was asked, did I sign that paper, and I just said, “ I didn’t even open that thing, there is no way, there is too much legal jargon.” So I said, “why don’t you send me something that is seven pages long.”
They literally sent me back something that was seven pages long, and I hardly read that thing either, but I signed it and sent it back and have been licensed by Harley-Davidson ever since and that was probably my big break. Willie G. Davidson took note of my work and then after decades of being the only guy to sculpt the motorcycle in a serious fashion. It’s not a hobbyist or creating folk art but something that was on the level of fine art, because people do not see the motorcycle as something as worthy of fine art but to me it is. I am happy that I have found a half a dozen other people in the world that agree with me so Willie and licensing was probably my big break. That was in roughly 1999-2000.
SMM: How can the Museum best preserve the history of the Rally and Industry?
JD: I think with diorama’s like it already has. If you literally have a motorcycle that has race prominence, that set a record at the rally proper, that reflects the integrity of the industry but also shows the importance of the rally.
I do not know that the museum needs to do a whole lot with showing importance of the rally. Hundreds of thousands of people attending an event in a town with 5,000 people. You’ve got 10 tens or 100 thousand or 100 times the population of your town attending, obviously nobody needs to tell you how important that rally is.
SMM: What is your greatest achievement?
JD: I don’t know, I think the life I have lived. The fact that I have been able to marry a women who is my partner and best friend and supports me. Maybe the question was not so ethereal and the answer you are looking for is the by the horns 16 foot statue that sits in front of the Harley-Davidson museum. If that’s not my greatest achievement, it is certainly close.
