Tattooed
New York.

About This Exhibition

A collection assembled on Route 22
ended up at one of New York’s most
significant institutions.

The New York Historical Society’s 2017 exhibition Tattooed New York traced the history of tattooing in the city — from the Bowery parlors of the 1890s to the contemporary artists transforming the form. Lift Trucks Art contributed two of the exhibition’s most historically significant pieces: early drawings by Samuel F. O’Reilly, the inventor of the electric tattoo machine, and Ed Smith, one of the defining Bowery tattoo artists of the early 20th century.

These are not reproductions. They are original works, assembled over years by the Lift Trucks collection, and they traveled from a 1922 building on Route 22 in Croton Falls to one of New York’s most important cultural institutions.

The exhibition drew international press — BBC, TIME, Smithsonian, and others covered it extensively. For Lift Trucks, the show validated something that had been true all along: that what had been quietly assembled in Westchester represented a serious and historically significant body of work.

The classic tattoo archive remains one of Lift Trucks’ most substantial holdings — forty artists, decades of American ink history, documented and preserved. The NYHS exhibition was its highest-profile moment, but the collection continues to grow.