Raised and still living and working in New York City, Ruth Marten has worn several hats in spite of her abundant hair. She trained at the High School of Art and Design, graduating in 1967, and at Boston Museum of Fine Arts from 1968 to 1971. From 1972 to 1980 she was an important figure in the tattoo underground and, as one of the few women practicing the craft, influenced people’s ideas about body decoration, championing what came to be called neo-tribalism. Working during the disco and punk eras, she also tattooed in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris during the 10th Biennale de Paris.

She was hired by Jean-Paul Goude for her first illustration for Esquire, and had a thirty-year career illustrating for magazines, music and book covers, being best known for the cover designs for the Provence books of Peter Mayle. She had a brief stint as a fashion illustrator for Bergdorf Goodman, Salvatore Ferragamo, Barney’s, and Vogue magazine, and a growing love of the printed image informs her current work – altering the configuration and content of eighteenth-century copper plate engraving prints using overdrawing and collage.

Since 1989 Marten has expressed herself exclusively through drawings, paintings and sculptures. Exploring the phenomenon of hair for its sexual, cultural and purely textural content, she exhibited work based on this obsession at Littlejohn Contemporary and Adam Baumgold in New York, in the Pop Surrealism show at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, in Hair, Untangling a Social History at New York’s Tang Museum, and Hair on Fire at The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2003 she embarked upon her current interest in reworking the images and historical content of prints and engravings, which have been exhibited at Isis Gallery in London in 2008, and at the Van der Grinten Galerie in Köln, Germany, in 2013. As well as working on new material, Ruth Marten also teaches watercolour technique at the New York School of Visual Arts.

Ruth Marten’s website, where you can see more of her work, is here.