| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Mary Jane Haake |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Portland · Oregon |
| Date | 1977 CE |
| Style / Technique | medical and cosmetic micropigmentation grown from American traditional craft |
| Connected to | Bert Grimm, Vyvyn Lazonga, Jacci Gresham |
Archive Note
Mary Jane Haake was born in 1951 and came up through art school in Portland, Oregon. Around 1977 she found Bert Grimm's Portland shop, the last studio the man opened after running the Long Beach Pike for years. Grimm was about 78. She apprenticed with him for roughly four years, and the apprenticeship ran straight through her art-school years, two trainings happening at once.
That double track is what made her work distinct. Most tattooers of the 1970s came up through the street shops, carnival lots, and Navy-town storefronts. Haake came up through both the shop and the studio art program. On May 15, 1982, she earned a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, reported as the first person to receive a degree centered on tattooing at that institution. She was one of the first fine-art graduates to walk into the professional trade rather than out of it.
She also broke from the walk-in model. In 1981 she opened a by-appointment studio called Dermigraphics, a quiet booked-ahead room rather than a street shop taking whoever came through the door. Around that period she co-operated Sea Tramp Tattoo alongside Don Deaton, the Pike protege who had come up to run Grimm's Portland shop when Grimm fell ill, and she worked as a close associate of Dave Orlowski, Deaton's partner there.
Her real contribution was medical and cosmetic micropigmentation. She worked scar camouflage, eyebrow restoration for people with alopecia areata, repigmentation for vitiligo, and permanent makeup, eyeliner, brows, and lips. The work she is best known for is areola and nipple recreation for mastectomy patients, tattooing a believable areola back onto a reconstructed breast. She traced the underlying skin and scar technique to Grimm directly. By her account Grimm had camouflaged burns on soldiers gassed in the First World War, and the methods he used on that scarred skin became the methods she used on surgical scars sixty years on.
She pushed the technical side too. By 1990 she was testing topical anesthetic formulations developed with a Canadian chemist, work aimed at numbing skin before a long cosmetic session. In 2004 she founded a company called Dermal Source to supply those topical anesthetics to the beauty and tattoo trades, turning a working tattooer's problem into a product line.
The industry put her on its boards. Governor Barbara Roberts appointed her to Oregon's Advisory Council for Electrology, Permanent Color Technicians and Tattoo Artists, where she served from 1991 to 1996. She sat on the board of the Society of Cosmetic Professionals from 1992 to 1996 and served as vice president of Face and Body Professionals from 1997 to 2003. She remained based in Portland and active in the trade from the late 1970s forward.
Haake is the bridge figure in the record, the line that runs from Bert Grimm's wartime scar work and bold flash into the clinical room, post-mastectomy restoration, scar camouflage, repigmentation, the whole field of tattooing as repair rather than decoration. She carried one of the oldest American traditional lineages into medicine and kept it working there.