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Scissors tattooed on an SFAI student during Ed Hardy’s lecture on the history of tattooing in 1971.


Scissors Tattoo


Author
Jeff Gunderson

Decade

1920s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2010s


Tags

Ritual Printmaking 
Tattoos

 

Tattoos have probably been in the mix at SFAI since the 1870s, when the first sailor wandered off a ship and stumbled into 313 Pine Street (the school’s original location) with the classic sailor tattoo “He who is fated to be hanged will not drown.”

 JG 


SFAI student library workers Blythe Feeney and Max Blue check out each other’s strawberry forearm tattoos while checking out books at the circulation desk. In the last thirty years tattoos have become commonplace with SFAI students and faculty. A 1928 journal entry by Dorr Bothwell in Samoa; Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.“Well it’s done. Four hours of mild torture and I am tattooed ‘foasamoa’!!” Dorr Bothwell, in her 1928–29 journal, described receiving her first tattoos in Samoa. Bothwell studied at SFAI throughout the 1920s; traveled to Samoa, where she lived from 1928 into 1929; and then moved to Paris and Southern California before returning to San Francisco. She was a dynamic and influential teacher at the school from 1944 to 1949, and from 1952 to 1962, as well as a surrealist painter, noted designer, author, and color theorist. Dorr Bothwell: Self-Portrait with Tattoos, Samoa, 1928; watercolor and ink on paper; with permission of the Estate of Dorr Bothwell and the Archive of the Mendocino Heritage Artists.Bothwell’s self-portrait includes the tattoos she received in 1928 in Samoa. Dorr Bothwell taught color design at SFAI from the 1940s through the 1960s. Her students included Pirkle Jones and Carlos Villa. Ed Hardy studied printmaking with Gordon Cook, receiving his BFA in 1967. Hardy’s final etching for his BFA exhibition was titled Future Plans. Although Hardy was only lightly tattooed at the time, his shirtless self-portrait shows the fully tattooed future he envisioned for himself. Turning down a graduate-study fellowship at Yale, Hardy decided to pursue tattooing. Reaction to this career choice was mixed. Hardy writes in his autobiography, Wear Your Dreams (2013): “Some were appalled” at his “ditching High Art for a bastardized sailortown craft,” while others “applauded the weirdness of it.” Ed Hardy maintained close connections with many of his SFAI comrades after graduating—in particular teachers Gordon Cook and Joan Brown and his SoCal friend Richard Shaw, who was teaching ceramics at the school. Shaw had Hardy give a lecture called “History of Tattooing” to his graduate seminar in the early 1970s. Following the lecture, Hardy tattooed Shaw and students in the class. According to Shaw, it “blew the class away.” Ed Hardy tattooed this teacup on Richard Shaw’s arm during his class visit. In Tat2, Carlos Villa explores Maori tattoo imagery that parallels his exploration of his heritage as a Filipino artist. In 1981, Marcia Tucker wrote one of the first articles about tattooing to appear in a fine arts magazine; published in Artforum (May 1981), it featured the work of Jamie Summers (BFA, 1971), one of the few female tattooers. In 1981, Marcia Tucker wrote one of the first articles about tattooing to appear in a fine arts magazine; published in Artforum (May 1981), it featured the work of Jamie Summers (BFA, 1971), one of the few female tattooers. The first issue of Tattootime, 1982.Ed Hardy first explored the history of tattooing for a grade-school assignment on possible careers; he did his research at the Los Angeles Public Library, where he found very little material. In 1982 he filled this need for tattoo information by founding Tattootime, a groundbreaking periodical that provided a much-needed resource about tattooers and the cultural history of tattooing. Ron Meyers (New Genres MFA, 1995) studied with Paul Kos, Terry Fox, and others at SFAI. He decided to tattoo their names on his back along with those of his other influences, including Rimbaud, Artaud, Duchamp, Beuys, etc., for his Skin & Ink, exhibited in the 1995 Commencement Spring Show. Ron Meyers’s tattoo was honored in this banner project by Jon Rubin and John Herschend at SFAI’s Fort Mason’s campus in 2017.

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