Artists Don Ed Hardy and Laurie Steelink first met 30 years ago, both having received their BFAs – twenty years apart – from the San Francisco Art Institute. It was after Steelink attended Rutgers for her MFA that she was introduced to Hardy in New Jersey at the 1992 National Tattoo Convention. Both considered possibilities of tattooing as an extension of their art practices and in 1997 had the chance to explore it further when Steelink curated Hardy’s first Track 16 exhibition Permanent Curios.
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360° EXHIBITION WALKTHROUGH
Don Ed Hardy ~ Artist Bio
A Southern California native born in 1945, Hardy acted on his childhood determination to become a tattoo artist and underwent a tattoo apprenticeship while simultaneously receiving a B.F.A. degree in printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1967. His specialization in intaglio printmaking, with its “speed of line, rhythm, variety, and density of structure” prepared him well for the career that followed. He turned down a graduate fellowship offer from Yale School of Art and decided instead to begin tattooing professionally.
In 1973 at the invitation of the Japanese tattoo master Horihide, Hardy moved to Gifu, Japan where he studied and tattooed. The following year he opened Realistic Tattoo in San Francisco, a private studio where he undertook unique tattoo commissions tailored to his clients’ wishes and needs. Encouraging unique tattoo commissions from his customers created a permanent shift in Western tattooing with an emphasis on the potential of tattooing as an artistic expression.
In 1986 Hardy moved to Honolulu to concentrate more on his art. For the next ten years he would commute back and forth to San Francisco to tattoo. Hardy discovered that he could utilize imagery he developed as a tattoo artist in compositions that were large and complex. Brushes and pens on paper and canvas presented a challenging departure from tightly controlled tattoo work.
Hardy returned to printmaking in 1992, and early etchings created at presses in Chicago and San Francisco reveal a simple style akin to the “flash” in his tattoo repertoire. Later prints—particularly those done with Mullowney Printing (Nara, Japan, and San Francisco), Shark’s Ink (Boulder, Colorado), and Magnolia Editions (Oakland)—are larger, colorful, and more ebullient. Hardy describes them as a mix of “the grotesque, humorous, subtle, and flamboyant.”
Major career exhibitions include his first retrospective “Tattooing the Invisible Man” that was mounted at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica in 1999, his epic 500 foot scroll 2000 Dragons which was the focus of exhibitions in five different cities, and his finally major 2019 retrospective “Deeper Than Skin” at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. In addition to showing his own works, Hardy has curated a number of exhibitions for both galleries and nonprofit spaces and frequently lectures at museums and universities. His work has appeared in numerous periodicals, books, and films internationally. He has written and published more than thirty books on alternative art under the Hardy Marks imprint that he and his wife, Francesca Passalacqua, formed in 1982.
In 2000, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2008 he retired from tattooing to concentrate on art making. Hardy divides his time between his studios in Honolulu and in San Francisco.
Track 16 has published three exhibition catalogues with Hardy. They can be purchased on our webshop.
Don Ed Hardy.
Floaters (The Party's Over). 2020. Pencil on paper. 12 x 9 inches.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION BY DON ED HARDY
Laurie Steelink ~ Artist Bio
Multidisciplinary artist Laurie Steelink identifies as Akimel O’otham, and is a member of the Gila River Indian Community. Born in Phoenix, Arizona and raised in Tucson, she received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. She served as archivist for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection in New York, and was director of Track 16 Gallery from 2002 to 2016. In 2012, Steelink founded Cornelius Projects, an exhibition space in San Pedro, CA that she named after her father. The curatorial focus at Cornelius Projects is primarily the cultural history and the artists of San Pedro and the Harbor Area.
Steelink’s work has been exhibited internationally, and she has participated in Native American Indian Marketplaces at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and the Santa Fe Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her sprawling 2018 exhibition “Coming Into Being: Gathering the Elder in Me” at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro was a chance to put into practice the installation and assemblage ideas that connect to her Native American roots that she’d been exploring over the last decade. For the past six years she has been a core committee member for the annual The Many Winters Gathering of Elders held in San Pedro. Gina Lamb, an Associate Professor at Pitzer College, wrote of Steelink, “Critically engaging in both the long tradition of ‘Indian’ marketplaces and the current emergence of contemporary Native American artists, Laurie’s newest work is entering a fascinating intersection of these arenas by creating dialogue of humanization, new visual language, and respectful co-existence between these two worlds."
Laurie Steelink. Dream Landscape (Pieces of Grace Slick), 2022/2011. Layered acrylic and collage on paper, triptych. Framed. Each panel: 32 x 32 inches.
WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION BY LAURIE STEELINK
for inquiries email sean@track16.com
