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Burton Snowboard Project
Rides of Passage Exhibit
Sponsored by the Woodstock Tattoo Festival, Burton Snowboards, and Tattoo Artist Magazine |
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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. 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. Afterwhich any unsold boards would 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 Curse Mackey (from PIGFACE).
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. 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 and still had artists who wanted to participate so Burton was contacted and they came off some more boards for the project, which we promptly got rid of. 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 tattoo artists!! What makes it even more incredible is that they only had about a month to do complete the assignment.
Well, as you can see, the resulting artwork from this collection is absolutely astounding! (So far, there are only 101 of the decks on the site...we should have images of the rest soon.)
Stay tuned here for updates and the travel plans for the Burton gallery show. Also, Bruce Bart and Brett Bryan are hard at work on the book, so check back and we'll post any new info that comes along- including release dates when we know them.
**Send us your comments on the show via email or post them in our forum or guestbook. We may publish some of them in the coming book!!!**
UPDATE: 10-9-04
NYC SHOW/ Milk Gallery:
Just returned from the opening in NYC's Milk Gallery. I flew in on the 6th to help Curse hang the show and let me tell you, it was pretty awesome to see all these pieces hanging in that kind of environment. We hung the show all day and opened for the public that night at 8pm. Over 1000 people came through that night including some of New York's finest art collectors, models, actresses, and representatives from virtually every popular magazine outlet including ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, etc... not to mention some great participating artists like: Filip Leu, Mike Bellamy, Jason Leigh, Tristan Eaton, Crash, Todd Noble Hollaway, BJ Betts, Steve Boltz... to name a few. All in all it was a great experience and it could be a doorway for tattoo artists in the future to find a gallery space to exhibit their works on a much broader scale. We'll see about that in the coming months/years. What we do know is that people were awestruck by the presentation- from the gallery owners to the visiting tattooers. The show hangs until Oct. 10th, then it's packed up and shipped to LA.
Here's Burton's report on the show: http://www.burton.com/community/newsStoryIFrame.asp?newsID=281
Here's a link to the ESPN story on the NYC show:
http://expn.go.com/expn/story?pageName=041007_ride_of_passages
LA SHOW:
7:00PM - 10PM October 20th Rides of Passage Opening Party
(exhibit up through Oct. 22)
@ LaLuz DeJesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA. 90027
323.666.7667
Related Links
 Burton Snowboards
Woodstock Tattoo Festival
Subscribe to Tattoo Artist Magazine
© Tattoo Artist Magazine, The 7th Society. All rights reserved.
The Quarterly Trade Journal for the Professional Tattooer
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