Members Only Event

6:00p - Discussion in FIA Theater

Skin & Ink: A World Heritage of Tattooing  - For millennia, astonishingly diverse forms of tattooing have been produced by various cultures across the globe. Some employed tattoos for therapeutic or cosmetic purposes, to mark special life achievements, or to assert social identity. Others marked the body with symbols intended to promote fertility, protect themselves from malevolent spirits, or carry them safely into the afterlife. 

World traveler, anthropologist, and photographer Dr. Lars Krutak will share his 20-plus year journey to understand how tattoos “make” the people who wear them, part of which he chronicled in his Discovery Channel series Tattoo Hunter, as well as Netflix’s Explained and the forthcoming documentary Treasure of the Rice Terraces, featuring 107-year-old Kalinga master tattooist Apo Whang-Od Oggay of the northern Philippines.

In a richly illustrated talk based on his field research and the accounts of explorers, historians, and anthropologists, he will speak about tattoos around the world dating from 3000 BCE to the present. He will explore ancient tattooing traditions and reveal how tattoos exposed individual desires and fears, cultural values, spirituality, and ancestral ties that were written on the body in ink. 

Lars Krutak, PhD, is a tattoo anthropologist, photographer, and writer based in Washington, D.C. He is a research associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

7:00p - Exhibition Opening & Reception in Lobby

View the exhibition before it opens to the general public then join us in the FIA's grand Lobby for lite bites and a cash bar.