With its long history as one of the early epicenters of Southern California tattoo culture, Long Beach could soon be the place to go to learn everything about the body art form with the opening of the country’s first National Tattoo Art Museum.
“I’ve never understood why we don’t have a national museum,” said Charlie Cartwright, a tattoo artist and legend within the tattoo community, better known as Good Time Charlie, who is one of several artists leading the charge to open the museum Long Beach.
“Look at the popularity of tattooing,” he continued. “It’s exploded into a phenomenon now where you hardly see anyone without a tattoo. I think we deserve it. We really want to have it be a worldwide destination and a first class operation.”
Last year, Cartwright, who is now 82, got together with other well-known tattoo artists including Corey Miller, who has appeared on reality shows like “LA Ink,” Long Beach tattoo icon Kari Barba and others to form the Tattoo Heritage Project in order to raise funds to build the museum.
The group is holding one of its first fundraisers in Long Beach on Saturday, Nov. 5 with an art show organized by the Sullen Clothing company that’s made up of about 200 pieces of original artwork, including a few by well known tattooers as well as mixed-media artists and others.
“We’re trying to get the ball rolling and this fundraiser is going to be a pretty monumental event for the project,” Cartwright said.
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The museum project is in the very early stages and there is no timeline on an opening day or a physical location set yet, but according to the Heritage Project, plans call for an 8,000-5,000-square-foot facility that would attract about 250,000 visitors annually.
“I feel the history of tattoo is just as important as the history of anything because it’s our past and drives us forward as to what we can do in the future,” said Barba, who owns Outer Limit Tattoos in Long Beach, which opened in 1927 and is the longest continuously running tattoo shop in the country.
The museum would cover the gamut of tattoo history, dating back to earliest known tattoos from approximately 5,000 years ago.
“We want to have exhibits exhibiting everything from Indigenous people tattooing on up to the modern day,” Cartwright said. He envisions a venue displaying artwork from tattoo artists, artifacts, traveling collections, historical documents and even guest artists from around the world tattooing people inside the museum.
“It would be something like a Natural History Museum, basically of tattoos,” Barba added.
With events like the upcoming fundraiser, project officials hope to eventually raise an initial $2 million to help secure a location for the museum, and Long Beach is the logical place for the venue due to the city’s important role in the development of the art form, the tattoo artists noted.
Long Beach is where the colorful American traditional style of tattooing was born in the early 1900s at the Pike, an amusement park that was home to about a dozen tattoo shops where local tattoo pioneers like Cartwright earned their stripes.
The shops were kept busy thanks to the sailors who docked at the nearby ports and wanted to mark their journeys in ink with images that included ships, anchors, birds and compasses.
“The majority of people are either tattooed or they know someone who is tattooed and are interested in the history of how it started, where traditional tattoos came from and things like that,” said Barba, whose shop houses a small tattoo museum displaying items like vintage tattoo guns, flash art, early photos of the shops and tattooers at the Pike.
National Tattoo Art Museum fundraiser
When: 6-10 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5
Where: Expo Arts Center, 4321 Atlantic Blvd., Long Beach
More information: instagram.com/tattoo_heritage_project/