Pierced Hearts & True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos

Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos traced the evolution of early twentieth century "flash" tattoos to the work of contemporary tattoo artists today. Tattoos have long retained a subversive and marginal cultural status, and because the art form is so intimately linked to notions of bodily privacy, the taboos surrounding tattooing have made it one of the few artistic practices in the twentieth century to escape formal critical evaluation. Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos sought to initiate a serious consideration of this visually rich, complex, and pervasive artistic tradition.

Composed of hundreds of drawings which span from the late 1800s to 1995, the exhibition focused on American, European, and Japanese tattooing. Works included finished drawings, sketchbooks, and rough studies for tattoos, in addition to historical photographs of completed tattoos, original tattoo parlor signs, and tattoo machines. Many of the drawings in the exhibition were studies for commissioned tattoos and reflected the exchange and interaction between the "collector" and tattoo artist.

The exhibition featured the work of over sixty tattooists. Artists included Sailor Jerry Collins (1911-1973), an important Honolulu tattooer who fused Asian forms with the Western seafaring tradition and ushered in the modern era of tattoos in the late 1930s; Japanese tattoo masters such as Horiyoshi II (1916-1991) and Horiyoshi III (1947-), whose work with traditional hand tools embodies an unbroken 200-year lineage; European and American practitioners of "folk art" tattooing, who shared a common vocabulary of images (Joe Lieber, Rosie Camanga, Bert Grimm, "Stoney" St. Clair, Dainty Dotty, C.B. Davis, Gus Wagner, and Charlie Malta); and finally, a cross-section of the most innovative artists working in the field at the time, who had inspired the "tattoo renaissance" then underway, including Japanese, European, and American tattooists (Horigin, Alex Binnie, Mike Malone, Hanky Panky, Filip Leu, Jill Jordan, and Bob Roberts).

The exhibition was accompanied by an in-depth, fully-illustrated catalogue and included essays by the following authors: Don Ed Hardy, renowned tattooist and tattoo historian; Mark Taylor, noted philosopher/critic and professor of theology at Williams College; Margo DeMello, anthropologist, U.C. Davis; Alan Govenar, tattoo historian and founder of Documentary Arts, Dallas; and Mike McCabe, tattooist and tattoo historian.

Following its presentation at The Drawing Center, Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos traveled to Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Joan Lehman Center of Contemporary Art, Miami; and to the Center for the Arts, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco.