Collection: Don Ed Hardy

Working out of Honolulu and San Francisco, American painter, print-maker, and tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy (b. 1945) is an expert on the history, lore, and art of tattooing. His works in traditional media thus often owe much to the iconography, clean lines, and simplified stylizations of tattooing. He is a scholar on the subject, has curated numerous tattoo exhibitions, and has written, edited, and published 20 books on these alternative arts. Hardy was one of the first tattoo artists to cross western and Japanese styles. This brought prominence to his San Francisco shop, Tattoo City, and helped transform tattooing in the United States into a more sophisticated art form. He views painting and tattooing as similar forms of expressions, but notes that "skin is probably the most complex medium that I've ever tried to work with." A monograph of Hardy's work is titled Tatooing the Invisible Man.