Part of a generation that brought serious art credentials to tattooing, he campaigned to overturn a ban in New York and helped the form gain acceptance.
Spider Webb, a renowned tattoo artist known for his intricate designs and for his efforts to overturn the law that made tattooing illegal in New York City for decades, died on July 2 at his home in Asheville, N.C. He was 78.
His wife, Sharon O’Sullivan, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Spider — his real name was Joseph O’Sullivan (and “never Mr. Webb,” as The New York Times noted in 1974) — was part of a generation that brought serious art credentials to tattooing and helped it shed the disrepute that surrounded it in the middle of the last century, elevating it to acceptability and even chic. No one was more brash than Spider when it came to promoting tattooing as a form of artistic expression.
New York City banned tattooing in 1961, supposedly out of concern that it could spread hepatitis, although others, including Spider, had their own explanations.
“Tattooing is perfectly safe,” he said told United Press International in 1976. “The real reason it was made illegal was that people associate tattoos with undesirable types. They figured that by getting rid of tattoo artists, they’d get rid of undesirables.”
He had just broken that law in a very public way, with a bit of performance art as civil disobedience. The opening paragraph of the U.P.I. article gave the basics:
“‘Spider Webb,’ in front of the Museum of Modern Art, with a ship and an eagle on his chest, dragons on his arms and flowers on his legs, gave a lady called ‘The Shadow’ a bird on her back. And police gave him a summons.”
As he had hoped, he was charged with unlicensed tattooing, a misdemeanor, which enabled him to press the case in court that tattooing was artistic expression protected by the First Amendment. The State Supreme Court rejected his argument in 1978.
Spider pulled the same stunt in 1981 in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, joined by Annie Sprinkle, a performance artist and actress in X-rated movies. But this time, Ms. Sprinkle said, he could not get arrested.
She and Spider even had a friend call the police from a pay phone, pretending to be an outraged citizen, but to no avail, she said. They did, however, get some media coverage, and she got a wrist tattoo to go with others that he had given her earlier, including a parrot on her derrière.
“His role model was P.T. Barnum,” Ms. Sprinkle, who for several years let him use her New York apartment to give illegal tattoos, said in a phone interview. “He loved to put on a show. He was definitely a provocateur.”
Although Spider did not win the court battle, he and others ultimately won the war. In 1997 the city dropped its ban, which by then was being widely flouted anyway. (Police officers were said to be some of the best customers of the illegal tattoo parlors.) And Spider, who had maintained a parlor in Mount Vernon, N.Y., just outside the city limits, and later in Woodstock, N.Y., and Connecticut, had tattooed thousands of people, as well as published influential books, including “Pushing Ink: The Fine Art of Tattooing,” in 1979.
In 2017, when the New-York Historical Society mounted an exhibition called “Tattooed New York,” it took note of his role. Spider, it said in accompanying text, had “brought modern tattooing into art galleries and auction houses, combining tattooing with conceptual art in works such as ‘X-1000,’ in which he inked a small X on 1,000 people, and then 1,000 Xs on one person.”
Ms. Sprinkle said that Spider had often been the life of the party at her “Sprinkle Salon” gatherings, and that he had worn many other hats, including frontman for a band called the Electric Crutch, in which he wielded a guitar made out of a crutch.
“He couldn’t really play the guitar,” she said, “but it made some sounds.” She was often one of the band’s backup dancers, the Webbolettes.
“Tattooing was just one part of what he did,” she said. “He did sculpture, painting, drawing, performance art, comic books, video. His life was art.”
Joseph Patrick O’Sullivan was born on March 3, 1944, in the Bronx to David and Tecla (Baranowicz) O’Sullivan. He was 14 when he wandered into a Coney Island tattoo parlor and found his calling.
“I thought it was cool,” he told The News-Times of Danbury, Conn., in 2003. “The guy makes a drawing, puts it up on the wall, then puts it on people. I thought this was the life for me.”
He learned the craft working in Coney Island parlors, but, after serving in the Navy from 1962 to 1966, enhanced that knowledge with a serious art education: He earned a bachelor’s degree from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1970 and a master’s degree from the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
He took the name Spider Webb from a character that he liked in an old movie serial, “Tim Tyler’s Luck.”
“Tim was the good guy,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1973. “Spider was the bad guy. I thought that was a real gas, so I took the name.”
“He’ll tattoo anything,” that article said, “from a little ladybug for $10 to an entire body for $5,000.”
Spider was catching a wave. “In the last six years, tattooing has had a renaissance,” he told The New York Times in 1974. “It’s part of doing your own thing, dressing the way you want, men wearing earrings. The whole bit.”
Half of his customers were women, he said.
He was constantly innovating. In 1984, The Daily News wrote about a new addition to his repertory, calling it “the biggest innovation in skin art since Samuel O’Reilly invented the electric tattoo needle in 1890.” It was the three-dimensional tattoo. Look at one with those 3-D glasses that were popular in the 1950s, and it would really pop.
“It’s really a rather simple process,” he said, “combining a sort of double effect in the sketching of the tattoo with red and blue dyes.”
Spider’s many books include “Heavily Tattooed Men & Women” and “Dragons: The Art of Spider Webb.” His art was exhibited in various galleries over the years as well.
He and Ms. O’Sullivan (formerly Daly), were married for almost 60 years. In addition to her, he is survived by four children, Joseph, Kathleen, Patricia and Becca O’Sullivan; a brother, David O’Sullivan; and seven grandchildren.
Spider’s own first tattoo, acquired at Coney Island when he was 14, was a simple “Mom,” and over the years he did plenty of “Moms” and butterflies and other generic tattoos. But, he said, he much preferred to create original designs.
“Someone comes in, tells you their dreams, and they want you to interpret them,” he explained in the 2003 interview.
A good tattoo, he said, was a statement, an act of self-expression and liberation.
“People should celebrate their bodies and their own freedom,” he said. “Maybe they have to put on a necktie, go to work and play that game, but at least they’ve experienced a little escape.”
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Spider Webb, Tattoo Artist With a Defiant Streak, Dies at 78 - The New York Times
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