A new World; City tattoo artist expands shop to include art gallery.

Byline: Thomas Caywood

WORCESTER - Meet the city's newest gallery owner: Ben W. Mack, an affable, heavily inked tattoo artist with a throw-back handlebar mustache.

Mr. Mack, who tops off his distinctive look with an ever-present porkpie hat, aims to shake up the local tattoo subculture and the city's arts community by bringing them together under one roof.

The Worcester native recently opened Dark World Gallery, an art exhibition space tucked inside his spacious Grafton Hill tattoo shop.

Mr. Mack launched the venture within a venture last month with a showing of Worcester artist Jonathan M. Hansen's "The Asylum Series," a collection of mixed-media paintings exploring the primitive, sometimes brutal care dispensed by early mental hospitals.

The current show, an eclectic selection of tattoo artist Morgan Freeman's bold paintings and sketches, continues through the end of March. The next exhibition will feature oil-on-wood portraits by Sara Adrian of Columbus, Ohio.

The gallery space is a long and wide hallway leading from Out of the Dark World Tattoo's waiting area at the front of the deep building to the tattooing stations in the rear. Between the two long walls, there's ample room for dozens of canvases.

As the artistic provocateur in Mr. Mack had hoped, the first two shows already have inspired curiosity and interest among his tattoo customers - many of whom had never given much thought to contemporary art, if not dismissed it entirely as the province of wine-sipping socialites.

Mr. Mack, 29, who picked up the knack for running a small business working in his father's construction company from his early teens, said such stereotypes run in both directions.

"As tattoo artists, we get put into a category that we don't really fit into either," he said. "We're not just kids and punks. We draw. We paint. We're artists."

Mr. Mack and his partner, Danny Arpin Jr., opened Out of the Dark World three years ago and have since expanded the business to two locations.

In November, Mr. Mack moved the Grafton Hill location from a smaller storefront in the neighborhood to its present location at 179 Grafton St. The move more than doubled the size of the shop from 600 to 1,600 square feet.

Mr. Mack and his friends long had been active in arranging art shows at unusual venues around the city, including one last year at the Hotel Vernon's Ship Room in Kelley Square. When they saw the layout of the new tattoo shop, they knew they had to start their own gallery there, he said.

Mr. Mack's days already were crowded with his work as a tattoo artist and the job of running a growing small business, so he recruited Mr. Hansen and another local painter, Don Hartmann, to help him run the gallery and book shows.

They gave themselves formal gallery titles for fun - curator for Mr. Hansen and Mr. Hartmann and director for Mr. Mack - and then put out an online call for artists in early January. Digital portfolios soon overflowed their e-mail account, and they had booked most of the year within weeks, Mr. Mack recalled.

Artists from as far away as Ohio, Maryland and New York have been booked along with locals, he said.

Mr. Hansen, a middle-school art teacher in Mendon, is no stranger to unusual exhibition spaces, having once shown his work at a Starbucks store in Framingham. But his Asylum paintings would have been deemed too dark for a Starbucks, and likely for some galleries too.

"For a tattoo shop, it's more about pushing the envelope. Not that we want to offend people, but we do want to challenge people," Mr. Hansen said.

If the work is good, Mr. Mack said, they might even book a show that drips syrupy wholesomeness because "that pushes the envelope of the tattoo shop."

"We're trying not to have any rules," he said.

Because the tattoo shop that surrounds it pays the bills, Dark World Gallery is free from the normal commercial pressures of the gallery business. Mr. Mack and his curators need not consider how likely the work is to sell when selecting shows. If nothing sells or nobody comes specifically to see the exhibit, so be it.

"The worst-case scenario is that we and our customers get to look at the art and love it," he said with a shrug.

So far, the horizon stretching envisioned by Mr. Mack has mainly gone on among the body art set. Most of the people who see the paintings are customers walking through the gallery on their way to get a tattoo.

But Mr. Mack said he has seen some evidence that the word is getting out to the wider arts community, too.

"There was this woman who came in one day that just seemed out of place. She was a very professional-looking older lady," he recalled.

Mr. Mack asked if he could help her, and the woman said that she had heard about an art show in the shop. After perusing Mr. Hansen's paintings, the woman chatted some more with Mr. Mack. She confessed that she had never been in a tattoo shop before.

"After we talked a while, she said, `You know what, I might just get one,'" Mr. Mack recalled.

And so she did - a small flower etched into the flesh of her ankle by a talented tattoo artist who also happens to be the city's newest gallery owner.

ART: PHOTO

PHOTOG: T&G Staff/TOM RETTIG

CUTLINE: Ben W. Mack of Oxford is pictured at his Dark World Tattoo shop in Worcester. He recently opened Dark World Gallery, an art exhibition space inside the tattoo shop.