The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art hosted its tattoo design workshop Tuesday afternoon. The monthly workshop educates visitors on how to design tattoos based on art pieces found throughout Eskenazi’s art collections.
Attendees could draw their tattoos at tables with various colored pencils, markers and pens. They could use henna ink to see how their designs would translate to skin without committing to a permanent tattoo.
Around 10 people attended the event.
IU seniors Sean Rowe and Cole Rodia were two of them, with Rodia attending for a class called “Artifacts, Museums, and Everyday Life.” They both pulled inspiration from the animals found in the museum’s “Art of Africa, Oceania, and Indigenous Art of the Americas” collection. Rodia based his design off a crocodile in black ink on the Niger Delta peoples’ “Headdress in the Form of Crocodile.”
“Because they’re semi-aquatic, they’re on water and on land, it represents duality and flexibility, which I thought was pretty interesting,” Rodia said.
Rowe based his design of a grazing gemsbok, a species of antelope with tall horns, on a mask found in the exhibit.
“It just represents, you know, family,” Rowe said. “It’s very territorial, so it represents defense, as well.”
Other attendees at the workshop pulled inspiration from other parts of the museum, such as the sculptures of coral reefs and aquatic creatures from “Mulyana: Vital Ecosystems.”
“It’s been pretty relaxing, it’s a nice environment here,” Rowe said.
The workshop is currently guided by Keaton Evans-Black, the arts-based wellness experiences manager at Eskenazi. Before starting at Eskenazi, Evans-Black worked as an art therapist.
“I worked as a child-family therapist at a company that contracted with DCS (Department of Child Services),” Evans-Black said. “So I did a lot of addictions and trauma work, working with kids, teens, and adults, kind of just a whole gamut of people to work with.”
He said he uses this experience during his tattoo workshop by creating an open space where attendees can unwind, reflect and discuss their own experiences through art.
While working towards his master's in art therapy, Evans-Black wrote a thesis about how people use trauma and life experiences to gain inspiration for their tattoos.
He explained the human brain is engineered to constantly search the environment around us and assess whether something is dangerous or safe. This means that when something sticks out in a new environment, it is because there is some sort of significance to it, whether it be danger or a sense of comfort.
“If you look at something for a fraction of a second longer than anything else in the room, it’s probably safe to say there’s something about that object that has some kind of meaning to you,” Evans-Black said. “If something in the painting is of interest to you, maybe you have a tie to it or a memory that’s related to stuff like that.”
He uses this thought process when leading the tattoo design workshop at Eskenazi, which helps attendees find inspiration and significance for their tattoos from art pieces at the museum. At Tuesday night’s event, after a brief introduction, Evans-Black sent visitors to look through the exhibits at the museum and write about or sketch any patterns or pieces that stood out to them.
He also said not every tattoo needs to have a deep, personal story behind it.
“If you just think it looks cool, that means that it already has some kind of meaning,” Evans-Black said. “It means that you might have some kind of attraction to patterns in some way, it can just be as simple as that.”
The workshop will continue to take place on the second Tuesday of each month until the end of July inside the Simpson Center for Education at the Eskenazi Museum.
