Alan Govenar

This book explores the artistic nature of tattooing and celebrates its living, creative, changing essence. Alongside the omniscience of tattoing throughout the world for thousands of years, presented through rare artifacts, the book pays tribute to the pioneers of the modern era, those responsible for its great transformation into the mainstream. Tattooing has become one of the most dynamic artistic currents of our era and is ever-evolving, despite the great revolutions the art has undergone. This book looks to its foremost representatives, the tattoo artists themselves, the guardians of the temple. With this in mind, two types of contemporary workshop creations have been produced. The first one presents thirteen silicone models, thirteen ‘extracts’ of the body, prints modelled from actual people, used by tattoo artists in the exercise of their art, machine worked or using traditional tools, depending on their daily practice. In search of a mise en abyme, blank canvases were offered to other artists, in the classic application known as ‘body suit’. The artists featuring in the book are world recognized. All active continents are represented: Europe, America, Asia and Oceania. All practitioners are respected by their peers for their contribution to the art. Finally there is a series of photos presenting the two most recent currents in modern tattooing, a locker room of aesthetic graphics that firmly root tattooing in the third millennium.

The true story of a strong, successful, and independent woman tattooist and artist through her own words and art; the third book in a series about the Wagner tattooist family.? Lotteva Wagner Davis was an American original—a tattooist and western artist in the early to mid-20th century. Following in the footsteps of her parents, Gus and Maud Wagner—famous tattoo artists and carnival performers—Lotteva was raised in the carnival and started tattooing in 1919, when she was just nine years old. Like her father, she used only hand tools, eschewing electric tattoo machines. She was one of few tattooists to have completely bare skin; her mother forbade her father to tattoo her, relenting only after his death, but Lotteva didn’t want to be tattooed by anyone but her father. This is the third book in the series on the Wagner family, Last of the Hand Tattoo Artists, and is based on interviews with Lotteva and her cousin, Patricia Hook. It includes tattoo flash by Lotteva and her father, Gus, comparing their artistic styles and showing the evolution of hand tattoos from one generation to the next. Lotteva was also a prolific artist, focusing on western US and carnival themes. She also restored carousel horses and painted signs for carousels, carnivals, and other businesses. According to her cousin, Lotteva was “a person with one foot grounded in the ordinary world and the other in this crazy carnival world. Most people would never dare to do the stuff she did.”

The true story of Maud Wagner—contortionist, aerial artist, carnival performer and barker, wife, and mother—who defied Victorian-era conventions to blaze her own trail. Maud Stevens Wagner, the "Mona Lisa of American tattoo," was an ardent individualist who left home at a young age to pursue a career of her own making. An acrobat, she exuded an athletic strength as an aerial artist and contortionist. In the early 20th century, she was a thoroughly modern woman who asserted her independence and her own identity. Together with her husband, Gus (known as the “most artistically marked-up man in America"), Maud balanced parenting and work, traveling around the country as the Wagner’s Traveling Museum, exhibiting themselves and making tattoos in circus and carnival sideshows, dime museums, and pop-up shops. At the height of their careers, Maud and Gus established the Wagner Amusement Company and expanded their work to become promoters of street fairs, carnivals, and expositions. This book is the second of three in the series Last of the Hand Tattoo Artists, detailing the lives of Gus Wagner, Maud Wagner, and their daughter, Lotteva. Author Alan Govenar brings you Maud’s story with • an oral history from Maud’s daughter Lotteva Wagner Davis; • archival photos of Maud, Gus, and Maud's tattoos; • clippings and photographs from Gus Wagner’s scrapbooks; • the Wagners' tattoo flash from Gus Wagner's notebooks; and • newspaper articles and obituaries detailing Maud’s life. As the author eloquently puts it, “In one sense, Gus and Maud challenged all expectations, but in another, they embodied and celebrated the can-do spirit intrinsic to American life.”

New from Alan Govenar, Come Round Right is a deeply personal novel and a paean to a pivotal moment in American history—when the Vietnam War was raging, and the idealism of the 1960s was losing ground to frustration, anger, and violence.Spring, 1971. Eighteen-year-old Aaron Berg is hitchhiking for his life, trying to come to terms with the sexual assault he and his new girlfriend survived in Canada five months earlier. Determined to reclaim his faith in humanity, Aaron’s harrowing journey through Appalachia reveals newfound joys and an unexpected truth that changes his life.Lyrical and poetic, juxtaposing Shaker melodies with a twangy sound and a heavy percussive beat, Come Round Right is at once a moving reckoning with the author’s own trauma and an expansive novel that speaks to the most pressing issues of our time.

A visual history of the life of Augustus “Gus” Wagner and his work as a hand tattoo artist, exploring a relatively unknown area of American art history from the 1890s to the 1930s. In 1897, Gus Wagner embarked on a four-year career as a merchant seaman. While traveling the world, he discovered the art of tattooing, learning from tribesmen in Java and Borneo who showed him how to use traditional handmade tools. By 1901, Gus reportedly had 264 tattoos of his own (and over 800 by 1908), allowing him to promote himself as “the most artistically marked-up man in America.” Back home, Gus embarked on a 40-year career as a traveling tattooist, tattooed man, and circus performer. He largely eschewed the new electric tattooing machines that transformed the art form after 1890, and remained faithful to his handheld instruments. Along with other wandering artists, Gus carried tattooing inland from coastal ports, making it part of the culture of small-town America in the 20th century. Highlights of this book include: • More than 100 examples of Gus Wagner’s tattoo flash as well as photos of his life and work, including his handheld tattooing tools • Excerpts from interviews with Gus, telling his story in his own words • Selected passages from three of Herman Melville’s novels—Typee, White Jacket, and Moby Dick, to illuminate the context of the oral history of Gus Wagner (Melville was an astute observer of hand tattoo artists and their clientele) The tattoo flash in this book is a testimony to the richness of Gus Wagner’s image vocabulary, his life, and his artistic influences. This is the first in a series of three books exploring "the Last of the Hand Tattoo Artists." The next two books focus on Gus's wife, Maud, and their daughter, Lovetta, renowned hand tattoo artists in their own right.

A new biography of the beloved but mysterious Blind Lemon Jefferson, famous blues musician. Born in 1897, Jefferson was a blind street musician who played his guitar at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas, Texas, until a Paramount Records scout discovered him. Between 1926 and his untimely death in 1929, Jefferson made more than 80 records and became the biggest-selling blues singer in America. Although his recordings are extensive, details about his life are relatively few. Through Govenar and Lornell's extensive interviews and research, See That My Grave is Kept Clean gathers the scattered facts behind Blind Lemon Jefferson's mythic representations.

A new edition of the biography of Dallas' own Deep Ellum. Just outside of downtown Dallas lies a section of the city called Deep Ellum, where graffiti and murals decorate the walls of trendy shops, loft apartments, restaurants, nightclubs, art galleries, and tattoo studios. The area has been home to a remarkable array of businesses, creatives, and artistic practices since its birth 150 years ago as a Black center of business. Because of the area’s long association with blues and jazz musicians, Deep Ellum has been shrouded in myth and misconceptions which obscure its actual history. Alan Govenar and Jay Brakefield—using oral histories, old newspapers and photographs, city directories and maps, as well as more traditional public records and secondary sources—reveal another side of Deep Ellum which includes Central Track (formerly called Central Avenue), an area lined with Black-owned businesses which served both Black and white patrons during its heyday in the 1920s and 30s. In the Deep Ellum and Central Track areas, African Americans and whites, primarily Eastern European Jews, operated businesses from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, creating a unique social climate where cultural interaction took place. Much of the information in the book is presented through the stories of remarkable individuals, including professionals, pawnbrokers and other merchants, police officers, criminals, and the blues and jazz musicians who had a lasting impact on American popular music.

The inspiring story of an extraordinary woman and her commitment to photography, philanthropy, and advocacy. Explore the inspiring story of Anne Morgan (1873–1952), the youngest daughter of financier J. P. Morgan, and her pioneering use of photography to advance her social work and philanthropic mission. Time and again, Morgan used photographs to muster support for her relief efforts and charitable activities. The thousands of photos she commissioned during World War I stand as her enduring achievement. But it is the press images showing her social advocacy, the snapshots chronicling her private life, and the studio portraits displaying her poise, stature, and fascination with dressing up in costumes and uniforms that illuminate the context of her public work. Together, these offer an intriguing view of her world during the early and mid-20th century, when the photographic image emerged as one of the most pervasive means of mass communication. Coauthored by Guggenheim Fellow Alan Govenar and UCLA professor emerita Mary Niles Maack, Anne Morgan is a must-have addition to any library, whether personal or public.

The colorful life and work of Stoney St. Clair, an American tattoo icon. In this updated edition of Stoney Knows How, the extraordinary life of Stoney St. Clair—circus performer turned tattoo artist—comes to life in photos, tattoo flash, and his own words, edited by writer and filmmaker Alan Govenar. Born Leonard St. Clair in 1912 in West Virginia, Stoney discovered his passion for drawing at Johns Hopkins, where he was being treated for rheumatoid arthritis. Not deterred by his disability, he joined the circus at 15 as a sword swallower and then learned tattooing from other circus performers. From traveling with the circus to setting up tattoo shops in Tampa and Columbus, Stoney met, tattooed, and worked with some of the greatest. Vincent Canby, writing in the New York Times, described Stoney as “an ebullient little man with the gab of a circus tout (spoken in the accents of Appalachia) and a fund of bizarre stories about tattooing and unrelated matters.”

Dive into the life and work of master craftsman Jeronimo Lozano and his extraordinarily detailed retablos. Steeped in ancient Peruvian traditions, retablos are small sculpted figures that show religious and secular scenes housed in structures large and small, ranging from pistachio shells and matchboxes to handmade wooden boxes and freestanding installations. Lozano’s retablos are both traditional and innovative, visualizing the cultural life of people in the mountains of Peru, from ceremonies, processions, and market stands to fiestas, street performance, historical tableaux, and current events. Writer, documentarian, and folklorist Alan Govenar shares an in-depth interview with Lozano, tracking his childhood in Ayacucho, Peru, to his arrival in the US; how he's navigated his hearing disability; and his process from start to finish. Divided into My Story, My Life, and My Process, the interview is paired with colorful photographs of his work. This book is a celebration of the form of the retablo, one of the many folk and traditional art forms that make up the American arts-and-crafts landscape.

Inspired by The Decameron and its dark and satirical novellas, Boccaccio in the Berkshires chronicles the foibles of seven women and three men, all in their twenties, who meet in an online chat room for asymptomatic pandemic survivors. They have all endured the deaths of loved ones and decide to shelter together for fourteen days in an Italianate mansion in the Berkshires, offered to the group rent-free. The vacant but furnished villa provides a luxurious, yet bizarre, setting for members of the chat room, who leave their homes in different cities around the United States. Over the course of their stay, they bond together in unexpected ways as they tell each other stories, ranging from the personal to the ludicrous, at times riffing on the absurdity of Boccaccio’s tales. A terrible storm fractures the group and forces the characters to come to terms with their own lives as they pursue love, faith, and the truth that medieval history ultimately reveals.

Benny Joseph made his living as a professional photographer in Houston’s black community during the crucial decades from the 1950s through the early 1980s, when the amplified pulse of rhythm and blues underscored the social changes sweeping the nation. Joseph photographed everything from parades and teen hops to impassioned speeches by civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall. Under contract to the pioneering black entrepreneur Don Robey, owner of the Duke and Peacock recording labels, Joseph photographed many of the popular recording artists of the day, including B.B. King, Mahalia Jackson, Buddy Ace, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Della Reese. With over 120 unique black and white photographs, this is a must have for all rhythm and blues enthusiasts, and a valuable historical resource for photography collectors. Writer, photographer, and filmmaker Alan Govenar met Joseph in 1984 when he was closing his studio in Houston’s Third Ward and worked with him over the next five years, sifting through thousands of negatives to identify and contextualize his most compelling images of this remarkable era.

A collection of first hand narratives and oral histories portraying the African American experience from slavery through emancipation and into the 20th century.African American Frontiers concentrates on the period from 1703, the date of the first published narrative of an African slave's attainment of freedom in the American colonies, to 1948, the year in which President Harry S. Truman integrated the United States armed forces through Executive Order 9981.This book is an invaluable historical resource that brings together diverse first-person accounts of individual African Americans through primary source documents, including: Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped the South by express mailing himself to Philadelphia in a wooden crate; Herb Jeffries, who introduced the black cowboy in Westerns; and Eunice Jackson, whose funeral home was destroyed in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Such little known stories, most of them previously unpublished, resonate with the determination, forbearance, moral strength, and imagination of the tellers, and give readers an opportunity to see the world as it once was, as told by the men and women who lived in it.Includes primary source documents