Born in 1933 in Manhattan, New York, Thom deVita is a singular artist tattoo; the place of his work is also remarkable, bringing the essence of the gesture in tattoo art while standing away from any possible categorization. Thom deVita grew up in the harsh and cosmopolitan area of the Lower East Side. His artistic practice is self-taught, and he only attends art schools as a model: he developed a pictorial collage and assemblage style in the line of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Joseph Cornell that he admires, and displays in the 1950s his work at outdoor art fairs of the Washington Square Park. It is then that he frequents the Abstract Expressionism painters of the New York School.
In 1961 tattooing becomes illegal in New York – Thom deVita begins tattooing shortly after, in an apartment on the 8th Avenue. He will be the first with Cliff Raven to tattoo designs from the Zuni Native American iconography, and to work, in black, on the Asian repertoire, thus prefiguring the historic revival of tribalism. Thom deVita remains true to a vision of the tattoo as a popular art; energy, spirituality and meaning carried by a tattoo interest him more than its technicality. His approach is intuitive, personal, totally outside of the fashions that surround him; he does not hesitate to cover a tattoo or work on the flash of another tattoo artist, guided by the same collage gesture.
The New York fauna that he tattoos, made of eccentrics, anarchists friends and Chinese gang members is the family in which he belongs, and over the name “underground” he will always prefers the one of “underworld” – and thus during all his life, as a tattoo artist and painter. In 1972 Ed Hardy meets him via Mick Malone. The street shop in which deVita operates at the time leaves him astonished: a place like no other, where the flashes are presented on pieces of wood, “mixing history and cultures, transcended boundaries of High and Low, Art and Craft. deVita’s tattoo customers became moving visual components in the living assemblage of the city.” He will dedicate to him a long feature in the 5th volume of his legendary publication TattooTime. The style of Thom deVita in the tattoo is that of a unique poetry, an important legacy and yet remains confidential in its History.
Since around 10 years he no longer tattoos and is dedicated to his painting. In 2012, Ed Hardy was published by Hardy Marks in a book bringing together for the first time his painting, drawing and collage works deVita Unauthorized : “Deep, sophisticated and unclassifiable, deVita is a great treasure who has not yet gained the recognition he deserves in the art world at large.”