Field Museum Drives Tattoo Truck to Logan Square

The Field Museum (1400 S. Lake Shore Drive) is bringing its “Tattoo Truck” to the Sauced Night Market at Emporium Arcade (2363 N. Milwaukee Ave.) on Nov. 15. The Field’s Tattoo exhibition opened on Oct. 21 and features tattoo iconography and artifacts from around the world but also some Logan Square artists. Neighbors can get outfitted with some temporary artwork based off the museum’s exhibit.

Get Saucy

The Sauced Night Market is a monthly roaming night market of culinary delights and local crafts. Sauced is celebrating its two-year anniversary Tuesday, Nov. 15 from 6–11 pm. They are appearing in Logan Square so residents can get a taste of Sauced.

The Field Museum’s Tattoo truck is a renovated Volkswagen bus. Guests can get “tattooed” by an airbrush artist or get a custom temporary tattoo from Tattly, designed by local artists participating in the Tattoo exhibit at the Field. All services are free, but 21+ for the event itself.

Get Ink’d

The Field is featuring a Tattoo Shop inside the exhibition itself, all of the artwork designed exclusively for the museum. There were 36 clients who were lucky enough to book an appointment for a tattoo, as slots were booked within a day of the announcement. However, museum guests can attend the live demos on select weekends beginning Nov. 19. Visitors can explore the shop itself when it’s not in use.

The guest artists at the museum include Lance Lloyd of Taylor Street Tattoo, Zack Stuka of Deluxe Tattoo, Joel Molina of Chicago Tattoo, Jennifer Trok of Speakeasy Tattoo, Tine DeFiore of Black Oak Tattoo and Stephanie Brown of Butterfat Studios. All of them already have months- or even years-long waiting lists.

The Field Museum took several factors into consideration when choosing those particular artists.

“We wanted to find top artists in Chicago – there are a lot of great artists in Chicago – and also interested in people who have designs related to plants and animals and other topics in natural history,” says Janet Hong, Exhibitions Project Manager at the Field. “There are a lot of people who specialize in very specific styles of tattooing and these folks really excel at beautiful aligned illustrations in things in nature and iconography very person to them.”

Get to Know The Logan Square Artists

Black Oak (3419 W. Fullerton Ave.) and Butterfat Studios (3129 W. Logan Blvd) are familiar to Logan Square residents. Stephanie Brown and Butterfat Studios, although relocating soon, has made Logan Square home for the last 6 years. Black Oak has joined the neighborhood more recently in the last year couple of years.

Brown has also worked closely with the artist in resident at the museum, Peggy Macnamara, who specializes in those vivid watercolors throughout the museum.

Jennifer Trok is also a familiar face to Logan Square since 2001. While Speakeasy is located in Wicker Park, Trok was a longtime resident and her husband is a partner in one of the neighborhood’s most famous pizza places, Dante’s  (3028 W. Armitage Ave & 2825 N. Milwaukee Ave.).

“I was approached by John Niederkorn who has been working with the Field Museum to set up the tattoo shops. John has worked for Taylor Street Tattoo for awhile and has a lot of experience running a shop,” says Trok.

The sketches that she’ll be tattooing were inspired by a recent trip to the museum. “I don’t think I have a favorite image,” Trok says, “but I’d be happy to tattoo the scarlet ibis.”

Get to the Exhibition

The exhibition will be at the museum until April 30, 2017. It was initially developed by Paris’s musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. It is the first time it will be on display in the United States. There are also artifacts from the Field Museum’s own collections, including some wood carvings of the Makonde people of East Africa that diplay scarification tattooing, or keloid tattoos.

The Field is also the first museum to have the Tattoo Shop inside the exhibition. “We’re the first and it took a lot of nerve and a lot of work to be a fully licensed tattoo shop in the exhibition,” says Janet Hong. “As a museum of natural history, we’re really interested in the history of tattooing in all the continents and are interested in that part of the story. We also wanted to show the living artwork of tattooing. It’s not something that just looks into the past.”

The schedule of the guest artists and when they will be at the museum can be found here. When visiting the museum or the Tattoo Truck this month, the Field Museum wants guests to share their stories and artwork with the hashtag #TATTOOFM