WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:29.960 In 1907, a young Norwegian sailor was shipwrecked in Canada, but instead of going back to Norway, 00:29.960 --> 00:31.880 he decided to stay in Canada. 00:31.880 --> 00:36.520 That decision would have a huge impact on the history of American popular art. 00:36.520 --> 00:38.960 The sailor's name was Amundetal. 00:38.960 --> 00:43.480 Soon after that shipwreck, he began working as a tattoo artist, and within a few years, 00:43.480 --> 00:45.560 he settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 00:45.560 --> 00:49.640 There, he became one of the most important people in tattoo history. 00:49.640 --> 00:55.640 As someone who loves the history of tattoos, I had to talk to a tattoo historian in Milwaukee to learn more. 00:55.640 --> 01:00.640 Take us back to the beginning. 01:00.640 --> 01:02.640 What is a tattoo? 01:02.640 --> 01:06.640 A tattoo is a graphic representation. 01:06.640 --> 01:13.640 It is a picture that someone who is a trained professional of some type puts into your skin. 01:13.640 --> 01:17.640 So the ink is put into a layer of your skin with a needle. 01:17.640 --> 01:18.640 It is then permanent. 01:18.640 --> 01:24.640 The basic is a needle or a sharp stick or a thorn, some sort of sharpened object 01:24.640 --> 01:28.640 that gets dipped in ink and literally tapped into the skin. 01:28.640 --> 01:35.640 The tattoo machine was invented and patented in the late 19th century, and so by the 19th and 19th and 20s, 01:35.640 --> 01:41.640 there were a lot more people who could get their hands on an essentially an easier way to tattoo and a quicker way to tattoo. 01:41.640 --> 01:45.640 Tattoos have been around for thousands of years. 01:45.640 --> 01:51.640 Some of the oldest tattoos found on mummified remains date back over 5,000 years ago. 01:51.640 --> 01:53.640 But how do we know about this deep history? 01:53.640 --> 01:57.640 Can you talk a little bit about how we know about tattooing from the past? 01:57.640 --> 02:02.640 In lots of ways, so there are definitely some tattooed mummies out there from various time periods, 02:02.640 --> 02:10.640 but there are lots of representations of humans with artwork on them that now looking at them we can interpret as tattoos. 02:10.640 --> 02:17.640 There is evidence of Greek tattoos in like representations of people on Greek pottery. 02:17.640 --> 02:20.640 For some people, tattoos hold religious meaning. 02:20.640 --> 02:23.640 For some, tattoos have been done as a health practice. 02:23.640 --> 02:26.640 Some people get tattoos because they're beautiful or cool. 02:26.640 --> 02:33.640 With so much history, it's not surprising to learn that cultures all over the world have practiced tattooing for different reasons. 02:33.640 --> 02:35.640 What are we looking at? 02:35.640 --> 02:42.640 We are looking at some really beautiful flash drawn by the master of Milwaukee, Amunditzel. 02:42.640 --> 02:45.640 Flash art sheets are an important part of tattooing history. 02:45.640 --> 02:49.640 These sheets display designs that were available from a tattoo artist. 02:49.640 --> 02:52.640 But why are these designs called flash? 02:52.640 --> 02:56.640 Some historians think it comes from tattooing's connection to the circus. 02:56.640 --> 03:03.640 Tattoo artists would display their flash sheets in a flashy manner to attract the attention of potential customers. 03:03.640 --> 03:07.640 Other historians think the word comes from how easy it is to select a design. 03:07.640 --> 03:09.640 You can choose it in a flash. 03:09.640 --> 03:17.640 Whatever the terms origins today, flash is how we refer to pre-drawn designs that tattoo artists make available to their customers. 03:17.640 --> 03:22.640 How does a Norwegian man end up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin tattooing for a living? 03:22.640 --> 03:23.640 Great question. 03:23.640 --> 03:33.640 So, Dietzel was born in Norway in 1891 and his father died when he was a teenager and he became a sailor to help supplement family income. 03:33.640 --> 03:39.640 And he actually ended up shipwrecked in Canada and sort of stranded and then made his way to the United States. 03:39.640 --> 03:45.640 He was a tattoo artist who worked in Milwaukee from 1912 to 1967. 03:45.640 --> 03:52.640 He had learned to tattoo an onboard ship as, again, something one does is one passes the time on a ship for months at a time. 03:52.640 --> 03:54.640 And he was very good. 03:54.640 --> 04:02.640 He was, I think, if you look at images of tattoos in the past, sometimes you look at tattoos and go, oh, that's not very good. 04:02.640 --> 04:06.640 But Dietzel's tattoos were very, they were well done. 04:06.640 --> 04:09.640 He was obviously a very, very talented artist. 04:09.640 --> 04:13.640 But he was also someone who continually practiced his art. 04:13.640 --> 04:15.640 So, he took art classes. 04:15.640 --> 04:16.640 He took painting classes. 04:16.640 --> 04:23.640 And he tattooed thousands and thousands and thousands of people in Milwaukee, especially during World War I and World War II. 04:23.640 --> 04:29.640 He also traveled in the 19 teens with carnivals and circuses as a tattooist. 04:29.640 --> 04:36.640 So, he both performed as a tattoo man and he also tattooed as part of his job. 04:36.640 --> 04:40.640 So, he would take flash places and display it. 04:40.640 --> 04:44.640 And he also then displayed this flash in his store to attract customers in Milwaukee. 04:44.640 --> 04:51.640 Starting in the 1870s and 1880s, there were heavily tattooed people who toured as a part of circus side shows. 04:51.640 --> 04:56.640 At this time, it would have been really rare to see a person covered in tattoos. 04:56.640 --> 05:03.640 These performers traveled across the United States and Europe, displaying their tattooed bodies before paying audiences. 05:03.640 --> 05:10.640 Some of these tattooed people were also tattoo artists, and so part of the act would be enticing customers to come get a tattoo after the show. 05:10.640 --> 05:19.640 While many circus performers in side shows found community, good paying jobs and independence, many were poorly treated by circus owners. 05:19.640 --> 05:26.640 And while displaying tattooed people introduced audiences to this cultural practice, it didn't normalize that practice, 05:26.640 --> 05:30.640 meaning that these shows didn't fight negative beliefs around tattoos. 05:30.640 --> 05:35.640 And for a long time, this is what prevented historians from taking tattoo history seriously. 05:35.640 --> 05:40.640 Can you talk about the American traditional tattoo style and what that means today? 05:40.640 --> 05:47.640 Sure, so what we now call old school or American traditional is a very distinct style of tattooing. 05:47.640 --> 05:53.640 It is tattoos that have generally uniform line outlines, limited color palette. 05:53.640 --> 06:09.640 So green, yellow, red, blue, very flat colors, not a lot of shading, and using what we would think of as traditional, like early American, late 19th century imagery. 06:09.640 --> 06:19.640 Seen in, say, visual culture in your home, in magazine drawings, decorations on furniture, decorations on paper. 06:19.640 --> 06:25.640 They were images that they were surrounded by in daily life in the end of the 19th century, early into the 20th century. 06:25.640 --> 06:29.640 They became part of tattooing because they were popular images. 06:29.640 --> 06:32.640 What makes it American? Why did it develop here in this country? 06:32.640 --> 06:37.640 During World War I, during World War II, obviously lots of Americans were going off to war. 06:37.640 --> 06:42.640 They were getting these commemorative tattoos, and tattooers were, they were doing a lot of business. 06:42.640 --> 06:53.640 They were doing a lot of tattoos, and so the images got simpler. They got quicker because if you've got a line of people out the door, you've got to get them all tattooed and back to their military base. 06:54.640 --> 06:58.640 Almond Ditzel was a key figure in the American traditional tattoo style. 06:58.640 --> 07:04.640 Like Amelia said, this was originally based on images from popular sources like magazines and decorative arts. 07:04.640 --> 07:12.640 The designs were then simplified for speed during wartime years, when thousands of new soldiers came to tattoo shops like Ditzel's for a tattoo. 07:12.640 --> 07:15.640 Ditzel's art spread through more than just his images. 07:15.640 --> 07:19.640 He also trained other tattoo artists who became famous in their own right. 07:19.640 --> 07:27.640 This relationship between a teacher and a student is an important part of how tattooing style is maintained and developed over decades, and has continued today. 07:27.640 --> 07:32.640 Wait a minute, Casey, that one looks a lot like the one you have on your arm. 07:32.640 --> 07:35.640 Did you choose that specific tattoo? 07:35.640 --> 07:46.640 I did, so I've always loved American traditional tattooing because of its connection to history, and because I'm from Wisconsin, and I love Wisconsin so much, the minute that I learned about Ditzel, I knew that I wanted a Ditzel girl. 07:47.640 --> 07:51.640 In modern American culture, tattoos were historically stigmatized. 07:51.640 --> 07:56.640 That means they were looked down on or thought of as a lesser art form not worthy of study. 07:56.640 --> 08:01.640 Sometimes that stigma got so bad that tattooing was outlawed. 08:01.640 --> 08:07.640 In Milwaukee, tattooing was made illegal from 1967 all the way until the late 1990s. 08:07.640 --> 08:14.640 So we're standing here in front of this flash sheet, and we keep talking about how this is art, and someone was thoughtful enough to save this. 08:14.640 --> 08:21.640 But I think when people hear art, they think of art in museums and paintings, so why wouldn't something like this have been thought of in the same way? 08:21.640 --> 08:27.640 This is art. These are original, hand-drawn creations, but there is definitely still a stigma. 08:27.640 --> 08:34.640 But I would also say that there is a lot of art out in the world that isn't in museums, and that doesn't make it less. 08:34.640 --> 08:37.640 That just makes it art not in museums. 08:37.640 --> 08:44.640 Tattooing is one of humanity's oldest art forms, but for a long time historians ignored them, or stigmatized them. 08:44.640 --> 08:48.640 They're an example of how bias can get in the way of studying and understanding history. 08:48.640 --> 08:54.640 In American visual culture, tattoos are essential for understanding many of our common symbols. 08:54.640 --> 09:00.640 Flags, ships, anchors, all owe something to tattoo artists like Milwaukee's Aum and Ditzel. 09:00.640 --> 09:03.640 But there are still lots of topics that need more study. 09:03.640 --> 09:07.640 What are some topics you're passionate about that you think more people should study? 09:07.640 --> 09:09.640 Maybe you can become the expert. 09:09.640 --> 09:11.640 I'm so lost in school. 09:15.640 --> 09:18.640 I know, I'm like, I've never been asked to do that. 09:18.640 --> 09:19.640 Yeah. 09:20.640 --> 09:22.640 I forgot really normally. 09:22.640 --> 09:24.640 Did you do art today? 09:33.640 --> 09:35.640 Thank you.