BALTIMORE — For one night, at least, tattoos — and the living canvases that carry them — took their place alongside Rembrandt, Matisse and Picasso.
The Baltimore Museum of Art celebrated the art of tattooing Saturday night with a panel discussion among prominent tattoo artists, a runway show displaying the strongest output from local shops and high- minded discussions of the importance of body art among African tribes and Japanese laborers.
“There has never been this many tattooed people in one room in a museum that haven’t been asked to leave,” said Bob Baxter of Skin & Ink magazine.
Young women strutted the runway in bikinis; potbellied men wore shorts or underwear to show off their elaborately inked arms, legs and backs. Observers marveled at the images of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, adapted from stained- glass windows, that adorned the calves of Lucas Walther, and the 31 feline species that peered through jungle foliage on the arms of Jan Bishop.
“I like cats,” she said.
The goal of the evening, according to Karen Milbourne, the museum’s former curator of African art who has since moved on to the National Museum of African Art in Washington, was to explore “the most intimate of canvases, the skin itself, the membrane that separates our inner essence from the world around us and allows us to project a sense of self for others to see and others to interpret.”
