One of the most important steps in turn of the century art making is how people are looking at a wide range of visual ideas and concepts. It is these ideals that brought attention to tattooing, catapulting it to a new level of respectability.

Beginning in the late 60's a small group of tattooists began to meld tattooing concepts from Japan, the Pacific Islands, and America into singular visions. These traditional designs where reworked to present modern ideals and experiences. In initiating this important step they lit the fuse that would ignite the tattoo renaissance not only in America but, worldwide.

The artists presented here were some of the first to bring a fine art sensibility to their work. They saw beyond the stigma of the culture and were able to visualize what it could be. As outsiders they presented their ideas using alternative mediums and placing them on non-traditional surfaces. They learned that the placement of an image could be more important then the image itself.

Thom deVita the elder statesman of this group experiments with collages and assemblages. DeVita creates his work using objects he finds; grape crates, scraps of paper, postage stamps, money, and rubbings from traditional tattoo stencils. Taking rubbings of these stencils and combining them with Xerox transfers, creating ghost images on recovered grape crates and paper. A prolific artist who has a drive to create has amassed a body of work that 10 artists couldn't produce in a lifetime. This massive body of work is best shown as instillation. Like an arm full of tattoos it needs the others to make its voice heard.

Don Ed Hardy, A Southern California native born in 1945, Hardy revived a childhood determination to become a tattoo artist and underwent a tattoo apprenticeship while simultaneously receiving a B.F.A. degree in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967. Tattooing professionally since then, he developed the fine art potential of the medium with emphasis on its Asian heritage. In 1973 he lived in Japan, studying with a traditional tattoo master - the first non-Asian to gain access to that world. He resumed these studies in Japan throughout the 1980s. In this exhibition Hardy presents largescale paintings on Tyvek plastic. These images are created with the artist's knowledge of Chinese and Japanese, as well as pre-Columbian, mythological forms. The resulting amalgamation of tattoo's popular stylizations with classical Asian forms and conceptual modes of painting produce a hybrid that is often, in the nature of alloys, stronger and even more beautiful than its individual parts.

Nick Bubash a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts has been working as a tattooist since 1972. World religions and the deities that their followers worship influence Bubash's work. His highly detailed drawings are combinations of animal, humans, and machines. The images he creates possess heavy lines and explosions of color, which are expressed in his richly detailed assemblages and sculptures. Each piece is a kind of fast, slick, and dark beauty, salted with references to Hindu, Serbo-Croatia, or maybe Hasidic Judaica! In this exhibition he presents assemblages and found object sculptures.

Mike Malone creates solid, powerful work in the classic American mode and an uncompromising determination to innovate, refine and improve the medium. He's done this by influencing countless tattooers worldwide wit his custom-built machines

and series of original flash designs - the best in the field for overall artistry and public appeal- as well as the example of his tattooing. He was responsible for encouraging late Paul Rogers to begin building custom machines in earnest. Through his travels Malone was the first to inspire a new breed of European tattooers to bring the art out of the dark ages in that part of the world. Malone has created a lot of custom work that had an impact on the tattoo sensibility of America. During his career he has spread his distinctive design style to thousand of people via his mail order "Mr. Lucky" line of T-shirts. His distinct tattoo flash that can be found in tattoo shops the world over under his nom de plume "Rollo Banks".

John Wyatt has been visiting tattoo shops since the late 1950's when he got his first tattoo. He became fascinated with art, the shops, and the artists. He later thought of becoming a tattoo artist and began visiting tattoo shops in New York City and Coney Island regularly as a teenager. He began photographing in the 1970's. He decided to combine his interest in tattooed people and photography by doing a series

of photographs of tattooed people. He later decided to draw from his interest in sociology and years of job experience and interview each person that he photographed. In 2003 Schiffer Publishing published his book "Under My Skin" an exceptional example of images celebrating tattoos and the people who have them and give them. All of the photographs presented in this exhibition are from his book.

Scott Harrison the youngest member of this group is infamous for his bizarre and appalling tattoo design sheets. This well traveled tattooist has plied his trade on two continents. He presents his beautifully render watercolors of traditional images in a bizarre sexually charged world.