Art museum reaches out to the inked community with 'Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo'

As the Portland Art Museum focuses on the art of tattoo through September, it will highlight the tattoos of Portlanders such as Storm Large, pictured here. (Laura Domela)

A woman walks into a shop. Thinks maybe it's a head shop because of all the whacked-out art in the window. But then she spies the sign: TATTOO.

It's 1977. She's on her lunch hour, passing through Old Town. Paralegal. Pantyhose and heels. Dress-for-Success suit.

On the other side of the door, she finds a little old man and a little old lady sitting at a table eating sandwiches, drinking tumblers full of what looks like iced tea, but which turns out to be whiskey. A toothless poodle with a stained, ancient face eats with them. I'm Bert Grimm, the man says, in her memories. Ever heard of me?

She shakes her head.

I've tattooed more people than anyone in the world, he says. Then, conspiratorially: Even Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde ...

Before her lunch hour is over, he has talked her into her first tattoo.

She's back that night -- after taking a black pen to herself to mark off what her bathing suit will not keep secret -- lying on the table in his shop, "pantyhose down around my knees, skirt up around my waist," ready for Mr. Grimm to draw a posy on her groin.

Of all the things she has considered, pain is not one of them.

As soon as the needle hits her skin, she leaps off the table.

Don't worry about that, the tattoo artists says. I'll just turn it into -- a curlicue ...

***

Thirty years pass, so much suspended between then and now, the endless circling of the curlicue:

Back then, the paralegal -- her name is Mary Jane Haake -- keeps hanging out at Bert Grimm's tattoo shop. She's already been enrolled in the Pacific Northwest College of Art, then at the Portland Art Museum. Thinks she wants to be a sculptress. She realizes she's not a very good sculptor. Decides she wants to tattoo instead. Tells the art school she wants to make that her major. Members of her thesis committee quit in protest. (Even Grimm's wife makes Mary Jane's boyfriend at the time sign a piece of paper saying that he would still consider marrying Mary Jane, should she pursues such a profession.) Newspapers run breathless stories on the craziness of her proposal: Mary Jane Haake is an artist who plans to parade some skin around the Portland Art Museum. Haake will be fully clothed. Her art will not be ...

Her parents in Salt Lake City read one of the stories, carried to their hometown paper via the AP wire. She has not told them about this part of her life -- the water tumblers of whiskey, the toothless poodle, the posy-ed groin; the way she honed her tattooing skills by renting a cheap motel room downtown, stocking it with wine and Cheetos, then inviting all the local winos to get as many free tattoos as they wanted.

Her parents book a flight to Oregon and show up at Bert's shop unannounced with a priest, ready to commence deprogramming. Bert, who has heard that Mary Jane's father is quite religious, thinks he will make peace by showing off samples of his bloody tattoos of Christ. Somehow, her father is not offended and actually decides he quite likes Bert.

Her parents leave with the priest. She opens her own studio in '81, called Dermigraphics, defends her thesis, gets her degree. Bert is one of the members of her thesis committee. Aw, give her an A, he says.

For years afterward, the man who had never completed schooling beyond the fourth grade begins handing out honorary diplomas signed "Professor Grimm." The week before he dies, Professor Grimm, his fingers black with ink, puts one last tattoo on a customer. The professor is 85.

Mary Jane watches as the tattoo studios in Portland begin to multiply, from just a handful to 10 to 20 and on and on, until it's hard to keep count anymore, and everyone seems to be an art school graduate now, putting paintings up in galleries as often as on skin.

Which brings us to now: One day, not long ago, the Portland Art Museum calls.

They want to showcase the art of tattoo, and they'd love her help.

Well, she thinks. We've just come full circle.

***

Portland ink: The exhibit and related events

Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo at the Portland Art Museum

What: Tattoo-related art from the museum's permanent collections, and multimedia presentations of Portland-area tattoo artists and their stories.

When: June 20-Sept. 6

Skinvisible: Tattoo Expo and Floorshow

What: Tattoos in fashion, music, performance and multimedia, and tributes to Portland's most accomplished tattoo artists. Celebrity tattoos and local artists.

When: July 25

Tattoo in Portland: Then and Now

What: Three generations of Portland tattoo artists discuss the history and popularity of tattoo art in Portland. Moderator: Mary Jane Haake. Panelists: Don Deaton, Jeff Johnson and Cherie Hiser.

When: 2 p.m. Aug. 2

Artists and Live Models in the Galleries

2 p.m. Aug. 8; Paul Bartnik on his extensive Escher tattoos

2 p.m. Aug. 15; Amanda Myers, owner of Infinity Tattoo

2 p.m. Aug. 22; Matt Reed, owner of Tiger Lily Tattoo

Submit your tattoo to the museum's Flickr site, through Sept. 6: www.flickr.com/groups/markingportland

For more information: www.portlandartmuseum.org

Elsewhere

NW Film Center

Films on the art of tattoo. Details: www.nwfilm.orgp

"Tattoos: A Scarred History," director: S.J. Evans; Great Britain, 2008: 4:30 p.m. Sunday, June 21

"Hori Smoku Sailor Jerry," director: Erich Weiss; United States, 2008: 7 p.m. July 25

"The Mark of Cain," director: Alix Lambert; Russia, 2007: 7 p.m. Aug. 20

"Blood and Feathers"

Group show featuring the art of Portland-area tattoo artists "outside the tattoo studio." 6-10 p.m. June 25, Optic Nerve Arts Tattoo Studio and Gallery, 1223 N.E. Alberta St.

I do not have a tattoo. As your narrator, this makes me feel like a bit of an impostor. I admit this upfront. But I spend my days collecting stories, and what are tattoos but another form of storytelling? Maybe even a more honest one. Words only take us so far. Like when I ask a woman I've just met about the tattoo around her wrist, and she tells me it's her father's signature, that he just disappeared one day. And we both stare at the tattoo, the delicacy of his handwriting. An image like that becomes a part of you, too.

Sometimes the city feels like a walking fever dream that way, the visions that appear to you on random arms and necks and backs and legs and hands: All the skulls and swallows. The pomegranates and post-apocalyptic cityscapes. Spider webs. Our Lady of Guadalupe. L-O-V-E. H-A-T-E. Roses, with and without thorns. Carp. Eviscerated horses. Octopuses. Mermaids. Smiling Rottweilers.

I've heard it said that this is the most tattooed city, per capita, in the world.

I don't know if you can really prove this.

But there's this: I'm flipping through the obituaries and here's one for an 88-year-old woman who died in May, who loved swimming at the Multnomah Athletic Club, growing jade plants and baking pies. "After her 70th birthday, Marie got a butterfly tattoo on her shoulder that became to all who knew her a symbol of her beauty and her willingness to fly away and experience the world. And she did. She traveled with her husband of 59 years, Floyd ... "

Or this: an announcement, that comes a few weeks later from the Portland Art Museum.

"Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo. June 20-September 6, 2009"

This is not an exhibit, per se. More like a three-month-long tattoo extravaganza. There will be interactive kiosks highlighting works from the museum's permanent collection, which reveal how the art form has been expressed throughout history and across cultures.

There are other bolder plans, plans that promise to "march right up against the threshold of respectability the traditional museum patronage might hold," as put by Rob Bearden, director of operations. A tattoo expo and floor show featuring the work of local artists is set for July (costume designers are apparently already being consulted on how to create "clothing" that will reveal what needs to be revealed, while shielding what can't -- some thresholds of respectability still cannot be crossed).

Tattoo artists and live models will be on display in the galleries. An interactive kiosk will allow visitors to "try on" virtual tattoo imagery (the closest you can get to re-creating a spontaneous tattoo decision, without hangover or regret). And a panel discussion that addresses tattooing's place in Portland, its history and its future -- is scheduled for August.

The moderator: Mary Jane Haake.

***

Mary Jane Haake

She meets me for breakfast one morning, carrying a case full of Bert Grimm's flash, the art that hung on his tattoo shop walls: bare-breasted sailor girls, Death Before Dishonor, an erupting Mount St. Helens next to a decidedly psychedelic mushroom, snakes, wolves, flying eyeballs and cabbage roses; photos of a sweet old woman with white hair, her naked swallow-adorned breasts resting on a polished coffee table, longtime Portland resident Elizabeth Weinzirl (wife of the county health officer and chairman of the department of public health at the medical school, back in the late '30s) one of the world's most famous tattoo fans, who died in 1993. (Of their first meeting at Mary Jane's studio: "She sat on my couch in nothing but her pantyhose ... dolphins jumping around ... and we proceeded to have a lovely discussion over a cup of tea.")

Remember what I said about fever dreams?

I end up at Sea Tramp, the oldest tattoo shop in town, where "Talk of the Nation: Science Friday" blares over the speakers, and an employee tries to politely bounce the guy who wanders in every day with a gallon of soda and wants to talk about his D&D escapades for three hours.

I stand out in gray morning with co-owner Jeff Johnson, who's got a memoir coming out in July from Random House called "Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, and My Life in Ink." He smokes a cigarette while the traffic on Southeast Grand Avenue grinds past. He came to the Sea Tramp to fill in for two weeks. "The first tattoo I did, I hated. I thought, 'I didn't spend my childhood drawing to do a Metallica tattoo.' The second one I did was a rose on an aerobics instructor's butt. I thought, 'I think I might be able to do this after all ...'" That was 18 years ago.

Maybe it's all the mermaid tattoos, emitting a low-frequency siren song. But the artists keep coming, setting up studios, taking the old traditions in new directions. James Kern moved here in 2004 from Chicago, eventually opening up his own place on Southeast Division Street called No Hope No Fear.

I am told, by other tattoo artists in town, that Kern has a tremendous reputation, leads industry seminars and has literally written the book on how to cover up tattoo work that clients come to regret. We sit on a couch in what was the living room of the converted bungalow where he works, flipping through a coffee-table book of his tattoos.

They are intricate, clearly time-consuming, much more like paintings. In fact, he says he draws his inspiration from his art history studies at The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, where he graduated in 1995: Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, Chuck Close. He has faithfully reproduced on flesh the paintings of Alex Grey, an artist whose work has been described in The New York Times as medical illustration on mescaline, with fans in both a Guggenheim curator and the inventor of LSD.

Later Kern sends me his bio: "After getting tattooed by a friend of mine in 1994, I thought I would try tattooing myself. I figured that I could tattoo at least as well as he did since we had gone to art school together and had similar drawing abilities ... The first tattoo I ever did was on myself. I had set up a small area in the kitchen of my apartment to work. It was dark and cramped, but I was determined to do it. I was tattooing my ankle with my copy of Spaulding's 'Tattooing A-Z' open in front of me. After four hours of struggling, I finally finished. It was a solid black geometric design of a saw blade. The same tattoo would take me about 40 minutes today."

That's the thing about Portland, says Amanda Myers, owner of Infinity Tattoo on North Lombard Street (who's been featured in Inked Magazine as one of the top women tattoo artists in the country).

"There are so many incredible artists in this town."

Everything's looping back on itself now, the saw blade spinning:

Amanda Myers apprenticed at the Sea Tramp, under Don Deaton, who bought the shop from Bert Grimm, who mentored Mary Jane Haake, who told Amanda Myers (a costume design major who had come to Oregon to work for the theater in Ashland, but in a twist of fate found herself in Portland, thinking about maybe a career in tattooing -- another kind of costuming, really, also all about texture and design and flow) that Don might have an opening at his shop ...

Myers is going to be part of the whole thing at the museum. But first she's participating in a group show along with other tattoo artists called "Blood and Feathers" at Optic Nerve Arts on Northeast Alberta Street. Work up on gallery walls, in addition to flesh. A Last Thursday opening on June 25. A veritable who's who of the tattoo artists working in Portland today.

"You should come," she says.

And that gets me thinking about another circle:

This one a bracelet on Mary Jane Haake's wrist, a Bert Grimm tattoo of a cabbage rose. "The same one all the Barnum and Bailey women got," she says.

And we think of tattoos as so permanent. And yet of all the art to make, it is perhaps the most human, the most transient.

"When I die," she says, tracing her wrist, closing the circle. "This will disappear."

Inara Verzemnieks: 503-221-8201; inarav@news.oregonian.com

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