![]() that’s kind of where it all began.”Īs the Long Beach Pike tattoo scene was waning in the 1970s, the black-and-gray style was picking up steam. “Whereas were happening in the brick-and-mortar parlors,” Baker adds, nodding at the apartment installation, “a lot of the black-and-gray style was happening in people’s kitchens and on the streets of East L.A. He has 50 or so across his body, he says, mostly all inked during his time behind bars as a teen. His arms and neck are covered in tattoos - roses, skulls, butterflies hovering over handcuffs. “When I got out of youth authority, the first thing I did was set up my prison-style tattoo machines in my kitchen, and I started tattooing people in there,” Negrete says, sitting down at the table. On the table is a dinged-up 1979 cassette player, a candle bearing the Virgin Mary’s image, his homemade tattoo machine, a shoe box and a row of tiny paper cups filled with black ink. He’s on an early walk through the show, and the machine is part of a kitchenette installation that’s based on his apartment after he was released from incarceration in 1977. “I made this for the exhibition,” Negrete says, holding a vibrating, clunky tattoo machine powered by a roll of D-sized batteries. It became a hub for American traditional tattoos that were colorful and cartoony - think “Mom” inside a bulbous heart - and during the war it was a popular stop for sailors passing through. The amusement park area boasted in the 1940s and 1950s the highest concentration of tattoo shops in the U.S., the museum says. A gallery toward the end of the exhibition tells the stories not only of the black-and-gray style but of the Long Beach Pike scene. The museum has built a working tattoo parlor, an amalgamation of classic California parlors, in which visitors can watch live demonstrations and get inked by one of 20 visiting artists. Another gallery showcases the work of female tattoo artists in indigenous cultures a video documentary depicts a 100-year-old Filipina woman, a member of the Kalinga tribe, training her niece in the art form. tattoo artist Kari Barba, who operates Outer Limits Tattoo in Long Beach, the longest continually running tattoo studio in the U.S., the museum says. Front and center is a graphic octopus design by pioneering L.A. The entrance gallery features original tattoo designs on lifesize silicon body parts. A primary goal, the museum says, is to showcase the role of women in the art form. So this exhibition is trying to take what you see on the streets and kind of unpack it, go deeper, understand that this is part of this bigger human impulse to mark our bodies.”Ībout a third of the exhibition is content original to the Natural History Museum. “But we don’t have this broader understanding of how this tradition came to be. It’s mainstream,” says the museum’s vice president of exhibitions, Gretchen Baker. “Now you walk down the street and almost everyone is tattooed. “Revolutionary type images, Aztec Indian images, lettering, pachuco crosses - because we always wanted to say who we were and where we were from.” “As Chicano, cholo gangsters, we had images that were very important to us,” Negrete says. Giving and receiving tattoos gave him purpose and a sense of belonging. He worked with black ink made from burned plastic ash mixed with water. ![]() Learning from other prisoners, he built a crude, single-needle tattoo machine with a Bic pen, a melted toothbrush, a cassette tape motor, a paper clip and a sharpened guitar string for the needle. Negrete made do with whatever materials he could get his hands on. A talented artist, he passed his hours inking fellow inmates with tattoos in exchange for cigarettes or Top Ramen soup. Freddy Negrete was 18 and serving time in a juvenile detention facility when the image came to him: the Greek masks of comedy and tragedy paired with the catchphrase “Smile Now, Cry Later.” It was 1974 and Negrete, a member of San Gabriel’s La Sangra gang, was incarcerated for a gang-related shooting. ![]()
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