Archive Note
Thom deVita was born in Manhattan in 1932 and grew up on the Lower East Side, mixing with New York School painters at the Cedar Tavern before turning to tattooing in the mid-1960s, not long after New York banned the trade. He worked out of a tenement apartment at 326 East 4th Street, drawing on Zuni and other Native American iconography, Japanese designs, and classic Americana, and treating his clients' bodies as ongoing collages. He redirected Mike Malone toward tattooing in 1968 and introduced Don Ed Hardy to that New York underground in 1972, feeding a lineage that ran into the Sailor Jerry and Hardy Marks world. Late in life he moved to Newburgh, New York, and kept making art until his death in 2018.