Opened by Artist Big Jaz in 2009, Greene Ave. Tattoo represents the changing face of Brooklyn. Amidst the mothers and baby strollers, the tattoo shop has become a neighborhood mainstay. Story by Anni Irish.
By Anni Irish
On a recent sunny fall afternoon I visited Greene Ave. Tattoo. The trees were just beginning to turn color even though it was an unseasonably warm day.
Greene Ave Tattoo is located in the historic neighborhood of Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. As I made my way down Greene Avenue from the B69 bus stop, I felt as if I had been transported into another time period. Each brownstone I passed seemed to be more beautiful then the last, with intricate wrought iron stair railings and seasonal floral arrangements in neatly tended flower boxes. While Greene Ave Tattoo seems to be an unlikely addition to this historic area of Brooklyn, it is quickly becoming part of its landscape.
Opened in 2009, Greene Ave. represents the changing face of Brooklyn. Amidst the mothers and baby strollers, tattooed hipsters entered and Greene Ave. has become a neighborhood mainstay.
As I entered the shop, I was immediately greeted by a fashionably dressed male receptionist in black thick-rimmed glasses. The reception area featured a collage of tattoo flash options (designs that artists have come up with to give walk ins ideas for tattoos) on the wall. The sitting area has each artist's portfolios neatly laid out on a table with comfortable chairs set out for customers to occupy as they waited for either a consultation or to get tattooed. The receptionist was very friendly, and told me to take a seat while he went to get shop apprentice, Lucas Finelli. I met Finelli this past summer at Project Parlor, a local bar where he also works.
I sat down with Finelli to discuss what it's like being a tattoo apprentice - how he got started and about tattoos in general. Finelli, who is a New Jersey native, has been apprenticing under tattooer and shop owner, Big Jaz, for the past four years. Finelli started getting tattooed at 16. He vividly remembers his dad taking him to a tattoo shop at age 8. During this particular visit, Finelli's dad got a tattoo of a fishing hook. While his dad was getting tattooed, Fellini became so fascinated by the process and asked so many questions, that the shop owner asked him to wait outside until his dad was finished. This experience at a young age solidified Finelli's love for tattooing.
Prior to apprenticing at Greene Ave., Finelli's first worked as a professional piercer and began "collecting" tattoos from artists all over the country. Collecting tattoos, for Finelli and many others, involves traveling or attending various tattoo conventions or shops to get tattooed by specific artists. Finellli's "collection" covers almost his entire body including his neck, arms, hands and knuckles.
When asked what he thought the difference between tattooing and piercing was, he described the piercing process as less "intimate" than tattooing because "tattooing means you will have an image on you permanently and a piercing is only temporary." Finelli's typical day at the shop begins with him arriving between 10 and 11am and he stays until close. He assists in all aspects of the day to day running of the shop including cleaning, ringing customers up, watching other artists tattoo in addition to building up his portfolio. He typically works about 80 hours a week just at the tattoo shop in addition to bartending to support himself. While his work-weeks are grueling, Finelli is genuinely enjoying this experience and learning many things.
Tattoo apprenticeships serve as a right of passage within the industry and entail many aspects. This means that the tattooer in charge of the apprentice is passing down their knowledge of the trade and investing in the person they have chosen. Finelli's apprenticeship is no different. Since 2008, Finelli has been working under Big Jaz to learn all the tricks of the trade. What makes this apprenticeship even more special is that Finelli is Big Jaz's third and final apprentice. Big Jaz has been tattooing since 1994 and is well known within the industry, often traveling to national and international tattoo conventions throughout the year. Big Jaz initially came to tattooing with a love of photo realism and black and gray work; over the years has cultivated this talent into all forms of tattooing. Greene Ave. is also the fourth tattoo shop that Big Jaz has opened and operated. His influence can be seen within Finelli's work and within the Greene Ave. shop in general.
During the interview, Finelli was hard at work on a watercolor of a tiger. When asked what his favorite images to create were, he responded quickly by saying "roses, tigers and old-school pinup girls." These images cover his work space and his attention to detail is evident in his paintings and drawings.
The charm of the Clinton Hill neighborhood has been incorporated into Greene Ave. through the people who work there, the decor of the shop and the tattoos they produce. While Greene Ave. has only been open for three years, it has quickly gained a loyal local following. Greene Ave. has a very successful future ahead of itself, which can only be underscored through the talented tattoo artists who work there and the great work they produce.
]]>Editor's Note: YBNY will be cross-posting the writings of artist Kathleen Griffin, as she prepares what will be the third largest public art installation in New York City, "Butterflies of Memory." Edited by Joel Silverstein.
I began drawing butterflies about six years ago. They just started popping into my head. It was strange how they would come, I knew they were an important idea for my work, but it would seem that just as I was understanding why, the idea would disappear, and I was left with the feeling of having forgotten something important. I found myself struggling to remember the idea. So I began to draw butterflies. At that time I was still living and working in Birmingham, Ala.
A year later when I moved up to Ithaca, New York, the butterflies were still appearing.
I threw away the first year's worth of my butterfly drawings, because they had no substance, they were just drawings of butterflies, the insect. This is the strange thing about drawing, sometimes you know you are just creating a space for an idea to grow, it becomes more of a muscular activity. I was deeply involved in other work at the time, so the butterflies were sedentary.
By the second year, it was clearer that the butterflies were about the pulling of memory. In the drawings they began pulling on things, on buildings, people and objects, tearing them down, carrying them away, lifting them up. Sometimes the drawings were dark and the butterflies destructive, other times they were a rescue or transformation. On my studio wall in pencil, I wrote "the butterflies of memory come in their outrageous beauty, they come to tear the buildings down." I began to think about architecture and the second construction inside it, the second building, the one created from memory. The building that can linger long after the first one falls.
I started making butterfly sculptures and moquettes, but nothing I was happy with. They sort of lingered in my drawing room as piles of drawings began to build up. It was in these drawings that I worked out how the butterflies functioned conceptually, and why even now I think of this piece as much in terms of drawing as I do sculpture - in part because of the scale and visual distance created by the size and location of the piece, but also because of how the piece is meant to function visually.
This is not at all typical of my sculptural work, which is usually acutely concerned with it's material reality and physical presence. This piece lingers in a border space, something that is real and yet still feels like you are only seeing it and then finishing it or making it real in your head. Like a piece of poetry made real, crystallizing for a minute. I think the piece will seem very unreal when it is up, the sunlight flashing and flickering on the gold, heightened by the fact that it's temporary. You will see it and then it will be gone, and you will wonder if you imagined it. It will only continue to exist as long as it is remembered.
Here's how it starts:
It's February 2009. I'm driving down the FDR for the billionth time in my life, feeling sad and overwhelmed. I'm broke and living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Astoria, using my living room as a studio. I had come two months before to New York with a plan, and with solid work in place. But everybody I knew had lost their jobs. I remember that January being the longest month. I had been teaching, and doing production design, but it all kept falling through. Or you work on a project and receive a fraction of the pay you were promised or the check bounces. But my sister was in New York, and upstate was lonely...
Around 70th Street, as I approach the rust-colored supports of the Queensboro bridge, I start thinking about the Ruins - the collapsed Smallpox Hospital on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, in the East River. I peer left, out the car window, past oncoming traffic, to see the building that I have loved since I was a little girl. I look to it for the comfort it has always provided me, and instead, I have a vision: Butterflies.
There has always been this connection for me. As a child I the early 1980s I'd visit the city several times-a-week from New Fairfield, Conn. with my mother - a Bronx native. On the ride home we'd get stuck in rush hour traffic, and for me this only heightened my anticipation of leering at the Ruins. I saw the stone structure as an old castle, and I would imagine that someday I would renovate the palace and live there - the Queen of Roosevelt Island. Being a little girl, I always thought it was a castle.
My mom was only 33, and I was six or seven, and we'd have these adventures--a return to this magical place, had crummy cars breaking down, and whenever the car broke down, someone would rescue us. New York in the 80s was wild. We'd go to a diner and they'd give us free donuts.
Later, when I tell my friend from graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design about my project, she laughed. I always mentioned the ruins on road trips from Providence, she said. I have imagined them a thousand different ways over my lifetime.
But today, I see a swarm of shining yellow butterflies over the building, carrying it off, magically transforming the Ruins; completing, perhaps, an idea I started as a young girl. It was like a dream that had always been floating just above the spires of the old Small Pox Hospital, waiting for me.
The Plan
"The Butterflies of Memory" is a temporary public sculpture on the site of the collapsed Smallpox Hospital Ruins on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan. Seventeen giant gold butterflies, each thirteen feet in diameter, will fly between 18 and 36 feet above the Ruins, visually carrying off the building. Installed in the summer of 2013, "Butterflies of Memory" will be viewable from Roosevelt Island, the Midtown Waterfront and the FDR highway, thus bringing an image of inspiration and beauty to over 2 million New Yorkers.
The butterflies themselves will be made of fiberglass and tubular steel, which will then be gold leafed. The structure that lifts them into the sky intended to look like lines drawn up in tension will be triangulated steel tubes that sleeve into one another, thickening as they move back to the building.
I believe that it is the third largest public art piece ever to be constructed in New York. In the tradition of the Gates and the Waterfalls the piece will be temporary. An image in time, an experience, a moment that flickers so brightly that it cannot last.
Follow "Butterflies of Memory" on Twitter: @Memoryflies
In 2011, Peck entered the Guinness Book of World Records for completing the most tattoos in 24 hours: 415. Peck and his ex-wife, Kat Von D, now share this title, and the practice of Friday the 13th tattoo marathons has quickly become a tradition among tattoo shops across the country. Although this event occurs on a national level, it is the shop-specific tattoos that make the event unique from shop to shop.
These tattooing marathons are held for 24 hours within Peck's Dallas, Texas shop, Elm Street Tattoos, every Friday the 13th, regardless of month. During the event, the only tattoos produced at Elm Street are the number "13". In other tattoo shops, there are specific flash designs (tattoo designs) that have been created specifically for the day. By producing flash specifically for the event, tattoo shops can lower pricing, cut down on the set up and break down of each tattoo station, and also the physical time spent tattooing each patron. With simplified designs, like the "13" that Peck only offers during this event, tattooers are better able to accommodate the large amount of people who participate.
Brooklyn shops that hosted the event included Greenpoint Tattoo Company, Inkman Tattoo, Gristle Tattoo, Citizen's Ink, and Magic Cobra Tattoo Society among others. As a way of advertising for the event, many shops posted images of the flash that they would be offering on their Facebook pages. As a tattoo enthusiast, I was curious about the hype around Friday the 13th.
After researching several of the shops involved in the Brooklyn area that would be offering Friday the 13th tattoos, I decided to go to Magic Cobra Tattoo. Magic Cobra Tattoo had over 100 tattoo flash options for this year's event which made my decision of narrowing it down to one tattoo difficult. Some of their choices included the Brooklyn Bridge with the number "13" incorporated into it, another design featured several pieces of bacon which were configured to form "13" and another option featured a banana peel which had the "13" coming out of it where the banana would typically be.
I met my friend Sarah in Williamsburg near the Metropolitan Ave stop on G train, and we walked to Magic Cobra, (located at 785 Driggs Avenue). Modeled after Peck's tattooing marathons, Magic Cobra has been holding 24-hour tattooing marathons on Friday the 13th for the past several years. Because the event was held all day, I decided to go around 4PM thinking I would avoid the after work rush. While I realized the Friday the 13th had gained notoriety, I had not anticipated the number of people that would be trying to get tattooed at the same time as me.
Walking up South 3rd street to Magic Cobra with Sarah, we were greeted by a growing crowd of people waiting to get tattooed. The line snaked around to the entrance of the tattoo shop and revealed even more people waiting to get tattooed. Despite the long wait, everyone seemed to be in great spirits both in part to the beautiful summer afternoon weather and also the efficiency with which the line seemed to move. A Magic Cobra employee worked the line with a clipboard and pen in hand answering questions and getting patrons to fill out the necessary paper work to get tattooed. I inquired how long the wait was at that time and was told "about three hours." I tried to gauge the situation further by asking the people standing in front of us how long they had been there. They said "the line had not moved in thirty minutes". Sarah and I decided to try our luck at another tattoo shop to see if the wait would be shorter.
We walked the short distance from Magic Cobra to Gristle tattoo (178 North 8th St.) When we arrived there was no line outside the shop, which seemed promising. As I entered Gristle, I noticed several people in the waiting area sitting quietly presumably waiting to get tattooed. I walked over to the receptionist and inquired, "how long would the wait be to get tattooed?" The receptionist informed me that "they were done with the Friday 13th tattoos for the day and were closing after the people who had been waiting were tattooed." It was nearing 5:00 PM and I was surprised that they were not holding the event longer. Sarah and I walked out of Gristle, sat down on the stoop and decided on our next course of action. With our iPhones in hand, we looked online to see the other shops in the area who were also offering the event.
The next closest shop to us was Greenpoint Tattoo Company, which was not in walking distance. I made a quick phone call to shop to see how long the wait time was there. I was told "it would be at least two hours to get in". I proceeded to call Citizen's Ink and was told it was same wait time there as well. Due to the long waits at the remaining shops holding the event, Sarah and I decided it might be time to call it a day and celebrate this Friday the 13th by getting a cocktail. While I wasn't able to get tattooed this Friday the 13th, I was still happy that I had been able to visit several of the tattoo shops in Brooklyn I had been meaning to go to.
Walking to The Counting Room for a drink, Sarah and I began discussing the afternoon's events. We discussed the history behind Friday the 13th tattooing and what it had come to represent.
"These events create a tattoo community" Sarah said, and that stuck with me.
In many ways these events are offering a different version of what the tattoo shop has traditionally been and are turning it on its head. My experience with tattooing has typically involved prolonged amounts of time in both physically getting tattooed and also through the coordinating of schedules between my regular tattooer and myself. Friday the 13th tattooing marathons seem to offer the opposite experience. While you do have to wait in long lines to get tattooed, there is an instantaneousness that is created through the event both in cost and the tattoo itself. The tattoos being produced during events such as these are typically and smaller and are less labor intensive and can be down in a short amount of time.
These events create a sense of community among the legions of people who participate in them. This sense of community is created through the tattoo shop itself, the people that attend the event, and the tattoos they might share. Next year I hope to take part in this event and have the tattoo to prove it.
By Annika Darling
New York City has long been a magnetic force for artists; a place in they flock for inspiration and recognition alike. Artists find it hard to pay their rent and forgo paying phone bills in exchange for art supplies. Only a few sell their work, let alone change the direction of the art world, and a scant number are noticed by gallery and museum giants.
One museum giant, The Whitney Museum of American Art, has recently chosen to recognize Yayoi Kusama in an exhibit Whitney Director Adam Weinberg, calls "a historic retrospective," providing a representative selection of work from a career that has lasted more than sixty years.
Today, Kusama is known as one of the most important living Japanese artists.
But in 1957, She soon joined the ranks of other struggling artists in New York City. as an artist, and in the late 1950s Kusama turned her sites on America. She soon joined the ranks of other struggling artists in New York City in 1957. At that time few knew her name in New York, though she'd received notable recognition in Japan in the early 1950s. For nearly 20 years Kusama, and New York engaged in a symbiotic relationship of change and influence.
During these years Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko and many other pivotal artists were, themselves, living and working in the New York art scene. The Pop movement was in its infancy, abstract expressionism was developing, and minimal art was beginning to be explored.
Laboring in dark basements and scavenging for food, Kusama would not let any amount of hardship deter her, from what some describe as an obsessive desire to create. When Weinberg spoke of Kusama during a press preview at the Whitney last week, he recalled a moment when the artist was asked if art made her happy.
"I never thought if art makes me happy or not," Kusama said. "I don't have anything else. Art is everything for me."
Amid Kusama's struggles early on in her career in New York, her family would send much needed support via airmail - was the only way she could communicate with them during these hard times. She made a collage of these air mail stickers. On a large canvas she pasted each tiny sticker until it filled the entire 64 by 34 inch canvas.
Today, 55 after coming to New York, Airmail Stickers is on display at the Whitney. Though this piece is extraordinary and represents a historic chapter in Kusama's life, the exhibit as a whole tries not to highlight any individual piece. Instead it focuses on the magnitude of Kusama's body of work; representing a career spanning over 60 years.
Kusama's work is characterized by obsessive repetitive forms; her signature work is with dots. At first glance it may not seem like much. However, the exhibition at the Whitney is laid out in a somewhat chronological format and as you walk through the gallery, through her history, you began to grasp the momentousness of her work.
Through carefully preserved writings and documents, the exhibit encompasses Kusama's struggles and experiences of being Japanese during and after WWII, being in America during the Vietnam war and being a woman, a Japanese woman, in a predominately white, male New York art scene.
An entire room is committed to Kusama's dedicated documentation of her life, which in essence, is her art. The documentation gives more depth to her work by adding history; it helps the viewer understand why she used certain materials, and teases us with an inkling of what was going on in her mind during the creative process.
Though her accomplishments far exceed many artists' dreams, none of them have come without agonizing work and inner turmoil. The Whitney released a statement from Kusama with exhibit materials saying, "If it hadn't been for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago."
One piece that seemed to encompass the whole exhibition was a collage on paper by Joseph Cornell, made for Kusama in 1967. Joseph Cornell was a longtime friend and partner of Kusama's for a decade, and was markedly her only romantic, though sexless, relationship to date. He died in 1972, and in 1973 Kusama returned to Japan, ill. In 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself into a psychiatric institution where she lives to this day, and has begun to reinvent herself as a novelist and poet.
A poem in the collage, also by Cornell, reads:
Fly back to me
Spring flower
And I shall tie you
Like a butterfly
I taste some of
The drink in your
Glass that you leave
I drink to Yayoi
Now-
I think of you my princess
-J
Kusama has flown back to us, to New York City. Let us all drink to Yayoi.
Yayoi Kusama (A Historic Retrospective) is on display at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art through September 30th.
In Detroit, music is the predominant art form, Brooklyn-via-Detroit singer-songwriter Jonathan Dalin said Wednesday, and Motown and R&B are the predominant genres on Detroit radio.
So when you hear Dalin sing, the avant-garde texture and the synthesizer in his pieces can't mask the soul in his voice, a style gleaned from countless radio sing-alongs during his childhood in Motor City.
On Friday, Dalin brings his soul sensibilities to a retelling of the Greek legend, Echo and Narcissus, in his premiere production of "You Look Good" at the Wild Project, as part of the 2012 Fresh Fruit Festival. Dalin writes and directs, with provocative background film projections and staging by Calder Kusmierski Singer.
Dalin, who was mentored through the production process by Broadway Director Darren Katz, equates his troop of musicians - vocalists Kacey Cardin and DanPaul Roberts, guitarist Derek Van Scoten and drummer James Leggero - to a modern Greek Chorus.
"We're like a Greek Peter, Paul and Mary," he said. With references to mirrors and narcissism throughout the piece, it helps that they "oddly all sort of look alike," he said.
A demo of Dalin's "Tower," a song from "You Look Good"
"This is a story for all time," he said, adding that the ancient tale is a textbook example of the attachment theory in psychology. The players will be presented as god-like figures commenting from their perch on elements of the human caricature.
"You Look Good" is set in a utopian New York, at the crossroads of Agrarian and cosmopolitan culture, and Dalin's lyric driven songs take you there, somewhere in an alternate future of post-gender theater and "soul poperas," where we all look good.
"You Look Good" premieres Friday, July 20th, at 8:30 p.m. at the Wild Project, 195 East 3rd Street, between Avenues A and B. Click here for Tickets.
In 2010, calling upon his passion for music, Dave Foran founded Frisky Productions, an event management company that, in 2011, orchestrated its first major concert tour with Snoop Dogg in Brazil.
Catalpa NYC runs July 28 and 29 on Randalls Island.
For more information on Catalpa NYC, and to buy tickets, click here.
By Joel Silverstein
The show opened Thursday at the St. James Theater on West 44th St. But in the last week of previews, the company of "Leap of Faith" was glowing backstage. And not just because of Raúl Esparza's disco preacher jacket.
They all felt what was palpable from the audience; this movie remake will live long despite critical cynicism; its gratifying storyline, paired with a score from Tony and Academy Award-winning composer Alan Menken, make for a magnetic if predictable Broadway musical. But what musical isn't predictable? Is it the job of a musical to double as parable or tragedy or thriller?
Like Steve Martin in writer Janus Cercone's 1992 film, Esparza plays Jonas Nightingale, the crooked, hard-drinking preacher with a fitful conscience. The show starts as a revival, the company dressed in Gospel robes acting as ushers, and launches into a knee-slapping Gospel number, "Rise-Up," before taking a handful of country interludes, like "Fox in the Henhouse" and "I Can Read You," placing the production firmly in the musical's small town Kansas locale.
The revival atmosphere is evocative of other culture-creating favorites - a "Rocky Horror" for the churchgoing set.
During previews, women in the front row wore their Sunday best: flamboyant hats, white gloves and blue blazers. Later, members of the choir - the Angels of Mercy - troll the crowd with collection baskets, patrons waving (fake) dollar bills. The bills fluttered in the air until the basket was thrust in their direction, freeing their hands to propel toward heaven at the behest of Preacher Nightingale, the audience deaf to the cabs on the slick streets on the other side of the wall. They were in Kansas until 10:35.
Esparza, the Susan Lucci of Broadway stars (four Tony noms, no wins), warms up as "Leap" unfolds, his performance culminating in "Jonas' Soliloquy," a solo number that has him walking alone in a cornfield, calling out to God.
Leslie Odom, Jr. (NBC's "Smash") also shines as Jonas' morally superior successor, Isaiah, choir-leader Ida Mae's son. As Ida Mae, Kecia Lewis Evans has a gigantic singing range with soulful affects that hint at a history with Gospel music.
Backstage, Esparza gave all the credit to Menken and book-writers Cercone and Warren Leight ("Law and Order: SVU") before retiring to his dressing room to rest his instrument. Stacks of the "Leap of Faith" bills sat on prop shelves as stagehands cleaned and dried the stage.
Actors from the audience were ushered in from stage left to meet the cast, all singing praise like the choir before. Menken smiled. He'd been pulling the show along for nearly a decade, he said. Now, he was there.
