From Tattoo Artist Magazine:
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!
;)
