Trending Tuesday: Skin Deep
A Skidmore student’s online tattoo exhibition is the perfect summer read — and you can add your own story
The tank tops will come out at Alive at Five this week. So will the ink.
Walk through the crowd at Saratoga Arts’ summer concert series any Thursday evening and you’ll see it everywhere — on forearms, shoulders, calves, the backs of necks. Every tattoo, a sentence.
Most people never ask what it says.
Lauren Attwell did.
The Skidmore College senior spent the past year building Inked: Stigma, Otherness, and Art, an online exhibition at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum that treats tattooing as exactly what it has always been: art, identity, and a five-thousand-year-old conversation about who belongs and who doesn’t. The exhibition — free, accessible from any device, and open through Sept. 27 — invites anyone to add their own story to its growing archive.
“Tattoos are a way to decorate yourself and physically display your individuality,” Attwell told Skidmore College.
Attwell is an art history and anthropology double major who served as the Tang’s 2024-25 Carole Marchand ‘57 Endowed Intern. Given full creative freedom for her capstone project, she built an exhibition around a subject she’d been thinking about long before she set foot in a museum.
Her first tattoo — a sun on her left arm, matching her mother’s — came at 18. A second, inspired by the Lascaux cave paintings, followed a study abroad program in Dublin. She chose an artist who hand-pokes designs, drawn to the intimacy of that process.
The exhibition draws on the Tang’s permanent collection, featuring photography, prints, and drawings spanning more than a century of tattoo culture. The works trace tattooing across subcultures — queer communities, prison culture, the circus sideshow, the military, the punk underground — examining how the same mark can signal exclusion in one context and fierce belonging in another.
What Else to See at Skidmore
Designing Power: The Black Panther Party, through May 31
All These Growing Things, through July 19
Elevator Music 54: Hanna Tuulikki—spinning-in-stereo, through July 19
Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes, through July 26
Hyde Cabinet #31: Before Skidmore — The Woodlawn Estate, through Aug. 9
Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest, through Sept. 12, 2027
Pursuing Possibilities: Explorations in Glaze, through Sept. 12
In Ancient Greek, the word for tattooed mark is stigma. The exhibition doesn’t let you forget that.
Among the featured works is Catherine Opie’s Dyke (1993), a portrait of filmmaker Steak House, who wears the word tattooed on the back of her neck. What was weaponized as a slur becomes, in Opie’s framing — deliberately inspired by the formal portraiture of Hans Holbein the Younger — something regal.
Also included: Nan Goldin’s Mark Tattooing Mark, Boston 1978, shot during an era when tattooing was literally illegal in Massachusetts, and Danny Lyon’s Two Chicano Inmates, Walls Unit (1968), which examines how incarcerated men assert identity on the one surface the state can’t fully control.
“Tattoos are a bold statement of a public identity,” Attwell told Skidmore College. “The person is saying, ‘Look at what I put on my body. Look at what I want to present to you.’”
The exhibition also has a community dimension that gives it unusual staying power. Visitors are invited to submit their own tattoo photos and stories through an interactive portal, and the submissions already posted read like a cross-section of human experience.
One person got a fish tattooed on her ankle as a talisman against drowning. Another carries his grandmother’s cookie recipe on his skin. A third got hers as a prize for winning a Mario Kart tournament in Dublin. A veteran has spent 25 years building on an American flag he got the week he joined the force.
“The community part of the event came from wanting to bring people together as an embodiment of the art form,” she told Skidmore College.
Inked: Stigma, Otherness, and Art is free and available now at tang.skidmore.edu. Submit your own tattoo story at https://app.youform.com/forms/exe4anfz. The exhibition closes Sept. 27.
—Michael
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