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Burton Snowboard Project
Rides of Passage Exhibit
Sponsored by the Woodstock Tattoo Festival, Burton Snowboards and Tattoo Artist Magazine
by Crash
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For those who don't know what this amazing collection is all about: The folks at the Woodstock Tattoo Festival, (Bruce Bart and Curse Mackey), contacted me at Tattoo Artist Magazine in mid-summer to see if I had any interest in helping them secure artists for a show they had planned for the festival. Here's how it broke down- 80 snowboard decks, provided by Burton, would be given to us to distribute to tattooers worldwide onto which each artist would draw, paint, hack or carve some sort of artwork and send it back for the show. Burton announced that the show would start at the Woodstock Festival, then travel to NYC, then LA, then some spots in Europe, and finally end the tour in Tokyo, Japan. Any unsold boards would then be returned to the artists to keep. Having participated somewhat in Sean Crofoot's skateboard show (L'art pour L'art) a few years ago, I thought this idea certainly had some potential so I signed on as co-curator with Woodstock convention promoter, Curse Mackey.
About a week into the project we already knew that we'd need more decks; the initial 80 boards were already basically gone and I hadn't even gotten through half my list of artists to contact. Burton coughed up another 20 decks that week. At about the same time Bruce started discussing the possibilities of publishing a book once the show was completed so I suggested we bring in Brett Bryan from Pulse since he did such a fantastic job on the "Abrasions" book showcasing that skateboard show mentioned earlier, which, until this show, was the largest collection of artworks done by tattooers to ever be shown anywhere at one time!
Meanwhile, we were out of decks again and still had artists who wanted to participate so, once again, Burton was contacted and they gave us what they declared were the final decks they could provide for the project, which we promptly got rid of. They deserve a great big hand from all of us. I'm sure they had no idea what they'd be dealing with when they signed on for a tattoo artist related project. The responses were pretty overwhelming, to say the least. In the end we had 128 tattooers commit to the show and receive decks ... and only 5 failed to complete the project- FIVE!! As most of you can guess, that's pretty unbelievable when we're talking about tattooers!! What makes it even more incredible is that they only had about a month to do complete the assignment.
There was also a contest sponsored by Burton in which they choose one of the contributing artists for a Burton design contract, worth up to $10,000. The runner-up, chosen by tattooers only, will have received $1000 worth of Burton gear, a fairly complete tattoo set-up from Pulse, a one year subscription to TAM, and whatever other goodies we could throw together for them.
Well, as you can see, the resulting artwork from this collection is absolutely astounding! The final act of this memorable event is the new Rides of Passage book, which should be out by the time this thing sees print. Keep your eyes peeled and show some support for these types of projects by purchasing a copy!
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