| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Spider Webb |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Modern |
| Location | Museum of Modern Art · Manhattan, New York |
| Date | 1976 CE |
| Style / Technique | Gallery-trained fine-art and conceptual tattooing |
| Connected to | NYC Tattoo Ban, NYC Lifts the Ban, Jonathan Shaw |
Archive Note
Joseph O'Sullivan was born in the Bronx in 1944 and took his working name, Spider Webb, from a character in a 1937 movie serial. He got his first tattoo at fourteen from a Coney Island tattooer, but he did not come up through the shops. He came in from the art world. After a Navy hitch from 1962 to 1966 he earned a fine-art degree from the School of Visual Arts in 1970 and a master's from the Instituto Allende in Mexico, then walked into tattooing as a trained gallery artist rather than a Bowery apprentice.
That outsider's angle shaped everything he did. He set up his main shop in Mount Vernon, just over the city line in Westchester, which let him work openly and legally through the whole stretch when tattooing was banned inside New York City. From that safe perch he decided to attack the ban head on, and he chose the loudest possible stage.
In 1976 Webb tattooed a woman known only as "The Shadow" on the sidewalk in front of the Museum of Modern Art. The point was to get caught. Police wrote him the misdemeanor summons he was after, and he used it to take the city to court, arguing that tattooing was protected speech under the First Amendment. In 1978 a New York court rejected him and let the ban stand. He lost the case but won the argument in the long run.
He ran the play again in 1981, this time on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, tattooing a small design on the wrist of the performance artist Annie Sprinkle. For Webb the act and the art were the same thing. He treated each protest as a piece of conceptual work, staged where the art establishment could not look away.
His longest reaching contribution sat on the page. In 1979 Simon and Schuster published Pushing Ink: The Fine Art of Tattooing, written with Marco Vassi and photographed by Charles Gatewood. It was one of the first mainstream books to make the case, in long prose and big photographs, that tattooing belonged beside painting and sculpture. It beat Don Ed Hardy's Tattoo Time to print by three years. Webb kept publishing for decades after, including Tattooed Women and a run of large-format books through the 1990s and 2000s that carried tattoo photography to a wide audience.
When New York finally lifted its ban in 1997, Webb claimed it as the vindication the courts had denied him two decades earlier. In 2017 the New-York Historical Society's Tattooed New York show placed him at the center of the ban-era underground, alongside Thom deVita, Mike Bakaty, and Ruth Marten. Before any of that, a young Jonathan Shaw had worked a stretch in Webb's studio on his way to founding Fun City. Webb died at his home in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2022, at seventy-eight, a fine artist who spent his career insisting the rest of the art world admit what he already knew.