![]() 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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