Biografie:
Spider Webb (aka: Joseph O'Sullivan) is a tattoo artist who has has spent most of his career promoting tattoos as a fine art, notably with his book Pushing Ink and his gallery shows in the 1970s.
A Master of Fine Arts, he brought modern tattoo art into SoHo galleries. He penned 15 books and created movies on the art form detailing it's history, evolution and soul. He inked rock stars like KISS, and most notably, he persistently fought the tattoo bans that plagued New York City, including risking jail by inking porn star Annie Sprinkle on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the mid-seventies.
More than twenty years later, in 1997, on the day when Mayor Giuliani was to sign a bill reversing the ban, Spider was at City Hall with a top hat and long feather plume tattoo machine ready to ink the city’s first legal tattoo in over 36 years.
Spider Webb is also known for his amazingly diverse tattoo machine collection, most of which he built using extremely rare or unusual materials including Meteorite and Shark Skin.
Webb has also been involved with tattoo performance art, including The Vampire's Kiss, and most notably X-1000, where he tattooed a small X on 1000 people and then 1000 X's on one person.
"To make tattooing illegal is to try to thwart one of humanity’s deepest desire—to make the body beautiful. One might as well try to legislate against love."
PAINTING/PRINT:
