Hardy was born in 1945 in Iowa but grew up in Costa Mesa, California. Donald Edward Talbott Hardy began his career in tattooing at a young age. "I got interested in tattoos when I was ten years old," he has said, "I started drawing on neighborhood kids. I was doing colored pencil tattoos on kids, using Maybelline eyeliner, I did that for about three years, and drew all this flash." His grandmother kept a lot of these sheets, and old photographs, so this early era of his tattoo work is pretty well documented. There is no denying that Destiny was previewed in a fairly significant way in the young Hardy's early life.
When Ed was a teenager, his interest turned from tattooing to creating imagery inspired by the So Cal hot-rod, custom-car, and surf cultures. In high school, an teacher exposed him to contemporary art and literature, like Pop Art and Beat poetry. Hardy visited Los Angeles galleries, including the now-legendary Ferus Gallery. He saw the work of Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, John Altoon, and Philip Guston. Don Ed ’s artwork from this period show their influence.
In the mid-1960s, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where he studied with Gordon Cook, who became an important mentor, taking classes with notable Bay Area Figurative artists including Joan Brown and Manual Neri. At Cook’s urging, Hardy visited the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor on numerous occasions where then-curator Gunter Troche introduced him to the prints of Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya, among others. Viewing old master prints and studying print history and his prints from this period shows this influence.
Hardy graduated from SFAI in 1967 with a degree in printmaking. His specialization in intaglio printmaking, with its “speed of line, rhythm, variety, and density of structure” prepared him well for the career that followed. He turned down a graduate fellowship offer from Yale University and decided instead to begin tattooing professionally. After a trip across the Bay to the tattoo studio of Phil Sparrow – who inked him and exposed him to irezumi – Hardy became convinced that his time would be better spent practicing his art on the human body.
Hardy considered fine art as elitist, and tattooing as a “forgotten American folk art” that should be elevated. He wanted to expand and elevate the vocabulay and imagery and even open the genre to larger audiences. It was a grand vision that boarders on profetic vision. When Don Ed Hardy set up his first tattoo shop, he took some precautions. The first was to work under an alias. The second was to move to Vancouver, a thousand miles from his San Francisco home, in order to ensure that when he matured and opened a shop in the Bay Area, he wouldn't have to see his embarrassing journeyman work loitering on the sidewalk. It was there that he met Tattoo Zeke Owen who taught Ed, more the fundaments of the art and the business, but the refinements. Zeke and Ed worked and collaborated together for years and in the early 70s they had a shop in San Diego where Mike Malone also worked, Ace Tattoo.
Hardy, Surfer Don, experienced a long learning curve in the course of working at tattoo studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, and Honolulu as he attempted to develop technical expertise and hone a personal style. An impressive selection of his tattoo “flash” (sample tattoo designs) from those years (1967–1971) will show his versions of standard “old school” tattoos as well as designs that melded Western imagery with the Japanese subject matter that he’d been introduced to by Sailor Jerry, a mentor tattooist in Honolulu . Hardy met Collins long before either became the icons they are today, around 1969, about the time Hardy's tattoo career began in earnest. He studied under him for years, and in 1973, when Collins suffered a heart attack and died, he left his shop to Hardy and another tattoo artist, Mike Malone—"if it doesn't end up in their hands," he wrote, "burn everything." Ed and Mike were working with Zeke Owen at Ace Taoo in San Diego. Malone, "Rollo", was the only one who could get away to Hawaii, so he did, changing the name to China Sea Tattoo.
Thanks to Collins’ rare connections with a number of Japanese tattooers, Hardy spent five months in Gifu City in 1973, working alongside Kazuo Oguri (Horihide), where he was the first Westerner to tattoo in the clandestine Japanese environment. In the Japanese tradition, the entire body would serve as a canvas for a single, sprawling, narrative design, and took a very different shape from the contained, piece meal Western style. This is when a big change came for him —"I'd just been tattooing sailors and stuff, I was trying to upgrade it. I came back from Japan determined to just open a private studio where people could come in and tell me what they want, instead of offering something from the wall." This revolutionary concept is part of what is Hardy's legacy in the world of tattooing—he helped bring the art form into the mainstream, and invited people into the design process.
When he returned, in 1974, he created “Realistic Tattoo Studio” at 2535 Van Ness in San Francisco, the pacesetter that was first to operate as a private, appointment only studio in the US. His emphasis here on large, ornate, custom tattoos tailored to the specific wishes of the customer truly changed the face of world tattooing. His artistic style changed the face of modern tattooing, and he became recognized for incorporating Japanese tattoo aesthetics and technique into his American style work. A large selection of preparatory drawings developed for private clients will be shown, including back and chest pieces and full-body tattoos.
In 1977 Hardy met Charlie Cartwright and Jack Rudy, the tattoo artists from Los Angeles who were offering the first professional prison style “Black & Grey” tattoos. Hardy recognized how special this new style was to the art of tattoo and got involved with the guys in Los Angeles. When Cartwright left LA, Hardy helped them open “Tattooland” with Jack Rudy, the “Black & Gray” shop. In 1977 Ed also opened his famous studio “Tattoo City“, the first was at 2906 Mission Street in San Francisco. It was the first shop to open in the Mission district and featured the fine-line “Black & Grey” work that was new to the tattoo world at that time. This shop was destroyed in a fire in 1978, open less than a year but making an indelible mark on the Bay area walk-in tattoo shop scene.
By this time Hardy's name was circulating outside of California, and he was getting a reputation for doing custom tattoos, which almost no one did in those days. He was drawing clients from really all over the place. Some wealthy New Yorkers would come out to get these large, Japanese influenced tattoos, and thought it might be a good place to work. Hardy never put down roots in New York, but he did set up shop in Washington Square for a couple of weeks. He was only there a couple of weeks. "I didn't really tattoo a lot... it was illegal in the city, there were only a few tattooers," he said of it later. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, Hardy had been doing what he would have never been able to legally do in NYC. World class tattooing at Realistic Tattoo Studio, his small, appointment-only shop modeled after the private parlors of Japan, and the first of its kind in the States.
By 1980 he had built an international reputation, and in 1986 decided to take a break from tattooing and return to drawing and painting in Honolulu, where he had moved. Hardy discovered then that he could utilize imagery that he had developed as a tattoo artist in compositions that were large and complex. Brushes and pens on paper and canvas presented a challenging departure from tightly controlled tattoo work. The process was nevertheless liberating, and during this time Hardy created a large body of work and exhibited frequently at galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ed was a pioneer in the field, pushing the tattoo art form to new heights and publishing books that told the history of the craft.
It was the unprecedented combination of formal art training, immersion in the American folk tradition of Sparrow and Sailor Jerry, and study abroad with the Japanese master Horihide, that distinguished Hardy from all three. It may also have been the fact that he respected these forebears equally. As he explained in an interview with de Young curator Karin Breuer, "very few tattooers had a formal art education, but a lot of them had natural ability and developed terrific styles. They were naïve and weren’t sullied by too much art education; they just pursued what they thought was right."
In 1982, Hardy, his wife and long time friend Ernie Carafa, formed Hardy Marks Publications. Under this marque, they began publishing the five-book series Tattootime. Hardy Marks has gone on to publish more than 25 books about alternative art, including catalogs of Hardy's work and that of Sailor Jerry Collins. EEE Productions (Ed Hardy, Ed Nolte, and Ernie Carafa) put together the first tattoo convention on the Queen Mary, as well as organizing many other tattoo conventions and expos.
The second Tattoo City, at 722 Columbus avenue, was opened in 1991 in response to the growing popularity of the art.
Hardy returned to printmaking in 1992, and early etchings created at presses in Chicago and San Francisco reveal a simple style akin to the “flash” in his tattoo repertoire. Later prints—particularly those done with Mullowney Printing (Nara, Japan, and San Francisco), Shark’s Ink (Boulder, Colorado), and Magnolia Editions (Oakland)—are larger, colorful, and more ebullient. Hardy describes them as a mix of “the grotesque, humorous, subtle, and flamboyant.” A large group, representative of this period and selected from Hardy’s 2017 gift to the Fine Arts Museums, will be included in the exhibition.
In 2000, he was appointed by Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown to the city's Cultural Arts Commission. To honor the millennial year 2000, which was also the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese zodiac, Hardy completed a 500-foot-long scroll painting that includes images of 2,000 dragons. This exuberant, celebratory painting will be shown in its entirety in the exhibition.
In 2003, several of Hardy’s tattoo designs formed the basis of the namesake global fashion line that became an international phenomenon. The licensing of his brand afforded Hardy the financial freedom to retreat from active tattooing and spend more time creating art in various media. In 2007, he created hand-painted porcelain in traditional Japanese forms as well as a series of unique wall-hung porcelains that he calls Ghosts. A selection will be included in the exhibition alongside Eyecons, a series of resin-coated paintings on panels, disks, and “boogie boards” that he created at Trillium Graphics (Brisbane, CA) in 2008. Rose, a jacquard tapestry (Magnolia Editions) from 2015, and recent paintings and drawings bring the exhibition up to date.
In 2005, approaching the fifth decade of his career, Hardy licensed over a thousand of his designs to Los Angeles-based fashion designer Christian Audigier, who applied the images to lifestyle items, making Hardy a household name. Later he said, The second Tattoo City, at 722 Columbus avenue, was opened in 1991 in response to the growing popularity of the art. "The amazing success of the Ed Hardy brand took me completely by surprise. Most of the images the licensee used came from flash I'd painted in the late '60s-early '70s—I had no idea about the degree of force and attraction these would generate. The whole thing was an unexpected windfall, and most people buying the products did not even know they were tattoo designs to begin with. It's probably the strangest thing that's happened to me in a life filled with amazing twists and turns."
Christian Audigier, previously marketed the imagery of Kenny Howard (aka Von Dutch), another noted American subculture artist. Audigier licensed the worldwide rights to the Ed Hardy brand in 2005 through his holding company, Nervous Tattoo, and employed the marketing techniques employed by Von Dutch Originals, marketing directly to celebrity clients and by opening stores in high-profile fashion districts. Ed Hardy stores were located in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis, Honolulu, Scottsdale, Tucson, Vancouver, Dubai, Johannesburg, Kuwait, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Gurgaon, Delhi, Mumbai, and Qatar.
The face of the brand (from 2008) was Sarah Larson. The brand gained significant popularity under Audigier, peaking at more than $700 million in gross revenue in 2009, but collapsed quickly in the following two years, leading to the closure of many stores. Among others, the Australian sublicensee of Ed Hardy (owned and operated by Gary Berman) entered administration and closed in 2010.
2008 Ed Hardy brand shoe. In the early 2000s, Hardy licensed Ku USA, Inc. to produce a clothing line based on his artwork.Within two years, the collection had drawn the interest of Saks Incorporated.Hardy and Ku USA formed Hardy Life,[citation needed] now Hardy Way LLC, which owns the Ed Hardy brand and trademarks. The brand has subsequently been extensively licensed, at one point having 70 sublicensees, selling clothing, accessories, lighters, perfume, hair styling tools, and condoms.
In May 2009, Iconix Brand Group announced it had acquired a 50 percent interest in Hardy Way, LLC, the owner of the Ed Hardy brand and trademarks, which it increased to 85% in 2011. Hardy retains a 15% minority stake.
Hardy blamed the collapse on creative and marketing decisions by Audigier, such as Audigier featuring his own name prominently on branded items (on one item 14 times, compared to Hardy's once), and prominent association with short-lived reality TV celebrity Jon Gosselin. Following legal battles, Hardy regained control of the brand in 2010, though as part of the settlement Nervous remained a licensee for T-shirts, hats, and hoodies.
Audigier's Hardy shirts attracted celebrities like Madonna and Michael Jackson at first.... but this celebrity association, Hardy once said, may have been the brand's downfall: "Christian worships celebrities so much, he will get next to anyone who is famous for anything." Indeed. By the late aughts the brand took a financial hit around the time the shirts were closely associated with the likes of reality TV star Jon Gosselin, who Audigier was photographed on a yacht with in Cannes. Hardy later spoke out, saying: "That Jon Gosselin thing was the nail in the coffin. That’s what tanked it. Macy's used to have a huge window display with Ed Hardy, and it filtered down and that’s why Macy’s dropped the brand."
Simon Doonan, who once touted the brand, by this point was saying it "represent[ed] bad taste." And this seems to still be the consensus. In the end, Hardy said, "morons dehumanized it."
Hardy hasn't always been as polite when speaking about Audigier, who he described in his 2013 book as: “ground zero of everything wrong with contemporary culture." This is Audigier, during the height of the brand's success:
In his book, Hardy also explained where things took a more serious turn, when Audigier manipulated his imagery and underreported sales.As the brand grew, Christian's megalomaniacal side started to show up. He had a design team reworking my original artwork and he was adding his own name to everything. It became "Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier" and I wasn't happy about that.
He began putting his face on billboards about Ed Hardy in Los Angeles. I went into an Ed Hardy store in New York and found a shirt where my imagery was paired up with the iconic Che Guevera head. I got on the phone immediately. They couldn't alter my images like that. With the rise in sales, Christian went to Steven [Hoel, who managed Hardy Life, Ed's ownership group] and negotiated with him to pay for certain things annually in exchange for a reduced royalty rate. That deal cost Hardy Life $50 million in royalties easily over the course of three years.
"Not only did Steven realize that he had been duped, but the unauthorized editing of my artwork really made it clear how low Christian would go. This guy was trading on my name and not paying enough for it... we sued Christian and the parent company, Nervous Tattoo, for $100 million for breach of contract."
This cost Hardy Life $5 million in legal fees, and the parties eventually reached a settlement. Hardy went on to partner with another company, Iconix Brand Group (which Audigier, through his holding Nervous Tattoo, Inc., sold most of the master license rights to in 2011). Today Hardy only retains a 15% minority stake in the brand bearing his name and reproducing his images.
When Audigier died, the NY Times referred to Hardy as a "once obscure San Francisco tattoo artist." Alas, Audigier had done what he promised Hardy prior to licensing his designs, to make his name known. Hardy just didn't expect this to be done in a way that, as he himself put it, would make his name "synonymous with douche."
In 2018, the brand successfully relaunched in Europe, and collaborations were presented with Missguided and Illustrated People amongst other brands, the latter sold via Selfridges, Asos and Topshop. In 2019, the brand carried out a further global collaboration with Rose In Good Faith.
Today, Ed Hardy apparel is sold in Europe at Zalando, House of Fraser and USC as well as independents, via monobrand stores across China and at department stores globally, though Don Ed Hardy has virtually no stake
Despite the unbelievable life and influence of Don Ed Hardy, he is still alive and kicking under all that noisy branding, just like Hardy's first tattoo is still buried under his black clouds. And he seems to regret those clouds much more than his involvement with Audigier. "The only thing I regret about my tattoos, all the early ones... I had them covered in black clouds... And now, you know I miss... some of these people were my mentors, I had evidence of their work, and I buried them in these stupid clouds. The rose is under there somewhere." Ed Hardy is an underlying, indelible influnce that will prevail in the skin of the tattoo legacy.
Don Ed Hardy
In the mid-1960s, he attended the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where he studied with Gordon Cook, who became an important mentor, taking classes with notable Bay Area Figurative artists including Joan Brown and Manual Neri. At Cook’s urging, Hardy visited the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor on numerous occasions where then-curator Gunter Troche introduced him to the prints of Dürer, Rembrandt, and Goya, among others. Viewing old master prints and studying print history and his prints from this period shows this influence.
Hardy considered fine art as elitist, and tattooing as a “forgotten American folk art” that should be elevated. He wanted to expand and elevate the vocabulay and imagery and even open the genre to larger audiences. It was a grand vision that boarders on profetic vision. When Don Ed Hardy set up his first tattoo shop, he took some precautions. The first was to work under an alias. The second was to move to Vancouver, a thousand miles from his San Francisco home, in order to ensure that when he matured and opened a shop in the Bay Area, he wouldn't have to see his embarrassing journeyman work loitering on the sidewalk. It was there that he met Tattoo Zeke Owen who taught Ed, more the fundaments of the art and the business, but the refinements. Zeke and Ed worked and collaborated together for years and in the early 70s they had a shop in San Diego where Mike Malone also worked, Ace Tattoo. 
Hardy, Surfer Don, experienced a long learning curve in the course of working at tattoo studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, Seattle, and Honolulu as he attempted to develop technical expertise and hone a personal style. An impressive selection of his tattoo “flash” (sample tattoo designs) from those years (1967–1971) will show his versions of standard “old school” tattoos as well as designs that melded Western imagery with the Japanese subject matter that he’d been introduced to by Sailor Jerry, a mentor tattooist in Honolulu . Hardy met Collins long before either became the icons they are today, around 1969, about the time Hardy's tattoo career began in earnest. He studied under him for years, and in 1973, when Collins suffered a heart attack and died, he left his shop to Hardy and another tattoo artist, Mike Malone—"if it doesn't end up in their hands," he wrote, "burn everything." Ed and Mike were working with Zeke Owen at Ace Taoo in San Diego. Malone, "Rollo", was the only one who could get away to Hawaii, so he did, changing the name to China Sea Tattoo. 
Thanks to Collins’ rare connections with a number of Japanese tattooers, Hardy spent five months in Gifu City in 1973, working alongside Kazuo Oguri (Horihide), where he was the first Westerner to tattoo in the clandestine Japanese environment. In the Japanese tradition, the entire body would serve as a canvas for a single, sprawling, narrative design, and took a very different shape from the contained, piece meal Western style. This is when a big change came for him —"I'd just been tattooing 
sailors and stuff, I was trying to upgrade it. I came back from Japan determined to just open a private studio where people could come in and tell me what they want, instead of offering something from the wall." This revolutionary concept is part of what is Hardy's legacy in the world of tattooing—he helped bring the art form into the mainstream, and invited people into the design process.
By 1980 he had built an international reputation, and in 1986 decided to take a break from tattooing and return to drawing and painting in Honolulu, where he had moved. Hardy discovered then that he could utilize imagery that he had developed as a tattoo artist in compositions that were large and complex. Brushes and pens on paper and canvas presented a challenging departure from tightly controlled tattoo work. The process was nevertheless liberating, and during this time Hardy created a large body of work and exhibited frequently at galleries in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ed was a pioneer in the field, pushing the tattoo art form to new heights and publishing books that told the history of the craft. 
In 2005, approaching the fifth decade of his career, Hardy licensed over a thousand of his designs to Los Angeles-based fashion designer Christian Audigier, who applied the images to lifestyle items, making Hardy a household name. Later he said, The second Tattoo City, at 722 Columbus avenue, was opened in 1991 in response to the growing popularity of the art. "The amazing success of the Ed Hardy brand took me completely by surprise. Most of the images the licensee used came from flash I'd painted in the late '60s-early '70s—I had no idea about the degree of force and attraction these would generate. The whole thing was an unexpected windfall, and most people buying the products did not even know they were tattoo designs to begin with. It's probably the strangest thing that's happened to me in a life filled with amazing twists and turns."
Hardy blamed the collapse on creative and marketing decisions by Audigier, such as Audigier featuring his own name prominently on branded items (on one item 14 times, compared to Hardy's once), and prominent association with short-lived reality TV celebrity Jon Gosselin. Following legal battles, Hardy regained control of the brand in 2010, though as part of the settlement Nervous remained a licensee for T-shirts, hats, and hoodies. 
In his book, Hardy also explained where things took a more serious turn, when Audigier manipulated his imagery and underreported sales.As the brand grew, Christian's megalomaniacal side started to show up. He had a design team reworking my original artwork and he was adding his own name to everything. It became "Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier" and I wasn't happy about that.