Tattoo: Identity Through Ink
@ Swedish American Museum
5211 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60640
Opening Friday, August 18th, from 6PM - 8PM
On view through Sunday, November 26th
The exhibit will open on Friday, Aug. 18, 6 p.m. with a talk at 7 p.m. by Ben Wah. Ben has been tattooing in Chicago and beyond since 1993. He opened Deluxe Tattoo in the Lakeview area in 1996, providing a place for customers to get great work from a wide variety of artists over the years. We have had guest artists from places as far away as South America, Asia and Europe. Ben continues to serve the customers of the world with unique style and vision.
The exhibit Tattoo: Identity Through Ink tells the story of tattoos and the people who have them. For more than 5,000 years, tattoos have helped document the history of humanity one painful mark at a time. Today, tattoos have never been more popular, but they are so much more than decoration. They are a powerful visual language of the skin, and, like texts, they permanently record memories, life stories, and personal achievements.
Tattoo: Identity Through Ink explores the personal and collective acts of human transformation through the tattoo traditions of indigenous peoples and other tattoo communities, past and present. Throughout history, people have applied tattoos to skin in their attempts to beautify, heal, empower, or carry the body into the afterlife. This exhibit shares the ways individual and group identities are formed, reinforced, and celebrated through tattoos.
The exhibit is curated by renowned anthropologist Dr. Lars Krutak. Krutak is a Research Associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has authored four books on the subject of indigenous body modification and produced and hosted the Discovery Channel series Tattoo Hunter. In this exhibition, Krutak shares his ongoing journey to understand how ancient and more contemporary tattoos “make” the people who wear them.
For those interested in Scandinavian connections, the exhibit celebrates artists like Norwegian Johan Frederik Knudsen and Norwegian-American Amund Dietzel, explores the question of whether or not Vikings had tattoos, and highlights the rise of the modern Neo-Nordic style of tattooing while putting the Scandinavian history and traditions of body ornamentation in context with many cultures.
This traveling exhibit is organized by Vesterheim, the national Norwegian-American Museum and Folk Art School and made possible by the generous support of Jon and Mary Hart.
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Tags: Amund Dietzel, Ben Wah, Chicago, Deluxe Tattoo, Dr. Lars Krutak, Edgewater, Johan Frederik Knudsen, Jon, Lakeview, Mary Hart, Swedish American Museum, Tattoo: Identity Through Ink, Vesterheim
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