| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Ruth Marten |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | East Village · New York City |
| Date | 1972 CE |
| Style / Technique | NYC ban-era underground fine-art tattooing; early Marquesan-leaning Neo-Tribalism; tattoo-as-performance |
| Connected to | NYC Tattoo Ban, Thom deVita, Spider Webb |
Archive Note
Ruth Marten was born in 1949 and came up through the art schools, not the back-room shops. She attended the High School of Art and Design in New York in 1967 and graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1971. She returned to New York and started tattooing in 1972, eleven years into the 1961 city ban that had pushed the whole trade into apartments and lofts. By one account from her 2015 Sang Bleu interview she was the only woman tattooing in New York in the early 1970s. The softer framing, one of the very few, is the one her own biography and the 2022 La Peaulogie scholarship carry, and it holds.
Her way in was lateral. Reviewed sources name no hands-on shop master. The Manhattan underground she joined was almost entirely male, Tony D'Annessa in Hell's Kitchen, Thom deVita in Alphabet City from the mid-1960s, Mike Bakaty founding Fineline in 1976. Marten came at it from the fine-art side and stayed close to it. Her tattoo work ran straight into the East Village and Bowery punk and queer-performance scenes, where the photographer Marcia Resnick was the documented bridge to the organizers of the 1978 Punk Art exhibition.
What made her distinct was treating the session itself as the artwork. In 1977 she traveled to the 10th Biennale de Paris at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, hung her paintings in the show, and set up a live tattoo stand inside the museum, tattooing artists including Marina Abramovic on the floor of the Biennale. The 1978 Punk Art exhibition in New York billed her live tattoo performance as a major attraction of the opening, per the 98 Bowery record. That museum-floor stand predates the better-known performance-tattoo work of her peer Spider Webb.
The clients anchor her as a working tattooer, not a tattoo-themed painter. She tattooed the rocker Helen Wheels, a Blue Oyster Cult songwriter. She tattooed the drag performer and actor Ethyl Eichelberger, a back piece drawn by Ken Tisa of a dancer with twirling scarves that Eichelberger would reveal mid-monologue by dropping his costume on stage. A 1979 card and a Stanley Stellar photograph both document that single tattoo. Her 1977 painting Marquesan Heads put Pacific facial-tattoo iconography on the wall, and the secondary record places her among the small group of 1970s American tattooers drawing on Polynesian and Marquesan sources, in dialogue with the West Coast tribal revival that Cliff Raven, Leo Zulueta, and Don Ed Hardy carried forward. The strong claim, first American Neo-Tribalist, is not settled and is best left as one of several.
The craft years were short and sharp. By 1980 the record converges on the close of her tattoo career, dated 1972 to 1980 across her biography, the Sang Bleu interview, and the Mezhoud article. She turned to illustration, starting with a Jean-Paul Goude commission for Esquire, and built a roughly thirty-year run of magazine, music, and book work, most associated with the line drawings for Peter Mayle's Year in Provence books for A.A. Knopf. From 2003 her defining late practice became reworked 18th-century engravings, overpainted and reassembled, collected by the De Young Museum, by Charles Saatchi, and by Don Ed Hardy.
The institutions caught up in 2017. The New-York Historical Society's Tattooed New York, curated by Cristian Petru Panaite and on view February 3 to April 30, grouped Marten with Thom deVita, Mike Bakaty, and Spider Webb as the fine artists who began exploring tattooing during the ban years. She was the only woman in that four. For the exhibition she gave a live tattoo demonstration at the museum, returning to the chair more than three decades after she had left it.