Robert Perry of Tattooed Mom on Philadelphia's creative playground

Philadelphians call it TMoms. People go there to eat, to drink and to meet each other, yet calling Tattooed Mom a bar and restaurant misses most of the point. It is closer to what the writer Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone, a pocket of freedom, except that this one has been open on South Street since 1997 and shows no sign of going anywhere.

It was started by Kathy Hughes, known to everyone as Mom, and Robert Perry, and it has become the home from home for skaters, punks, geeks and outsiders of every description, with room left over for the odd baby shower or technology meet-up. Perry took over sole ownership in 2010. In 2016 he sat down, over cheese fries, with Hyland Mather, the Amsterdam-based artist and curator who paints upstairs whenever he passes through Philadelphia, and afterwards answered a longer set of questions about the place and the people who have made it.

A younger, sassier sister

Perry explained that Tattooed Mom opened in 1997 as the punk rock little sister of Sugar Mom’s, a bar in Philadelphia’s Old City that has since closed. He and Hughes lived in the neighbourhood, felt it needed a place like TMoms, and jumped at the space when it came free. The bar has changed a great deal over twenty years, but he said its centre has always been community.

What he loves most, he said, is that it hosts celebrations for so many different tribes: baby showers and benefit nights, weddings and wakes. The aim is a safe and welcoming space with an open mind. Over the years it has been adopted by skaters, street artists, cyclists, LGBT groups, writers, activists, performers and makers of every kind, and he counted the bar’s habit of saying yes to them, and letting them meet and swap ideas, as its proudest achievement.

Two floors, two worlds

Mather described the building as two separate worlds. Downstairs is eccentric in its own way, with a sparkly gold bar and lime green walls, a strange but comfortable room. Upstairs is something else entirely: every surface is covered in street art and graffiti from around the world, and for a travelling artist nothing says playground quite like it. He asked how that had started, and how graffiti and street art had come to be encouraged there, never merely put up with.

Perry said the size of the building made the split natural. They finished the downstairs first, giving it what he called the feel of a sweet grandmother on acid, and still had a larger, rougher room above to fill. The money had run out, so they kept the upstairs very simple, taking their cue partly from the old corner bars where he misspent his youth and partly from the graffiti-covered houses they had lived in, where bands played in the living room.

The friends who turned up in the early days understood without being told that tagging upstairs was fine. Treat grandma’s living room downstairs with respect, and go wild upstairs. Word spread, first among Philadelphia’s graffiti, sticker and street artists, then among travelling makers from all over the world. Perry said the owners simply let it happen, and each visit added another layer to a riot of colour and shape. He believes people leave traces of themselves wherever they go, and the upstairs is those traces charged up and piled on every inch of the room. Twenty years on, layer upon layer of graffiti, stickers, paste-ups and installations have made it what it is.

No censorship

Asked whether he ever has to stop someone putting up something plainly nasty or obscene, Perry replied that what counts as obscene depends on who is looking, and that the bar does not censor. Some of what goes up may not be safe for work, unless, as he joked, you work there. Genuinely hateful or mean-spirited work is rare, and when it appears it is quickly subverted, painted over or remixed. The artists who use the room are protective of it and are usually the first to tell anyone with bad intentions to calm down and show respect, or leave.

A family business

Mather said that whenever he is there, working upstairs, everyone around him feels like family, and asked whether that was really how it worked behind the bar. Perry said it was. He called the staff his closest friends and said they look out for each other completely. Everyone who works there is creative in some way, whether as a musician, artist, writer or designer, which is why they embrace the constantly changing walls. The best compliment a visitor can pay, he said, is that they feel at home, and the staff try to make that true for regulars who have been coming since the first day and for people walking in for the first time.

The Magic Gardens

A few blocks away is Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, the mosaic environment built by the artist Isaiah Zagar, now a museum. Perry called it a gem and urged anyone visiting Philadelphia to see it in person. He has seen Zagar’s work all over the city, and especially around South Street, for as long as he has lived there. Zagar, he pointed out, has been working in the street, quite literally, since the 1960s, and he described him as a kind of ancestral godfather to the sticker kids, the installation artists and the wheatpasters who followed. The Gardens anchor the neighbourhood culturally, run a good programme in their gallery space, and are close to the bar in every sense: the staff turn up at each other’s events and each sends visitors to the other (Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens).

Many subcultures

Because TMoms serves many subcultures and not just one, Mather asked Perry for stories from a few of them, and Perry was happy to oblige.

On the technology crowd, he said they like the bar because they are creators too. They may not paste or paint, but they are building a new culture and a new way of seeing the world. TMoms was quick to take up social media, and many of its friends in tech first found the bar in the early days of Twitter. Instagram now lets it share the constantly changing walls, sometimes changing by the minute, with followers around the world.

Perry has a background in design and his own history with stickers and zines. What thrills him, he said, is watching artists develop over the years as he gets to know them. A sticker from Bob Will Reign or Under Water Pirates fifteen years old might sit beside something the same artist added last week. He enjoys seeing artists use the room as a place to play and try out ideas and materials without having to look over their shoulder, so that a new piece or series sometimes has a trial run upstairs before it reaches the street. He also likes seeing how artists respond to what is already there: how they use the existing layers, choose a spot, and how their work changes once it is left to fend for itself on walls nobody curates.

He told the story of an international printmaking conference that came to town some years ago. A group of the visiting artists discovered the upstairs and came back every night after the day’s sessions. At the end of the week they asked to put on a small pop-up to show what they had been making. Instead of hanging prints neatly in a white gallery, they took over the room, partied and pasted all night, and that single night was the exhibition: floors slick with wet paste, and prints from around the world going up on walls, doors and ceiling.

Characters Welcome

Perry singled out the bar’s annual sticker art show, Characters Welcome, as something he is especially proud of. In 2016 it reached its fifth year, with show dates of 11 and 12 November. It draws work from around the world, including the United States, Europe, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Canada and Indonesia, and all the proceeds go to local youth arts organisations. Because many of the artists are under 21, one date is always open to all ages, so that younger artists can see the show, eat free pizza, meet the sticker artists they look up to and collaborate on the spot.

Wheels

Mather’s next subculture was the alternative sports crowd: skaters, BMX riders and cycle racers. Perry said many of the staff and friends of the bar skate or ride, and that they have supported it loyally. TMoms has been a checkpoint on many alleycat races and hosts an annual Cranksgiving ride that collects food for Philabundance, the local food bank. The previous year’s ride brought in over five thousand pounds of food in an afternoon, so much that he wondered how the riders and the crates would both fit in the bar.

When the Cycle Messenger World Championships came to Philadelphia in 2000, the messengers adopted TMoms as their base, and eleven Polish riders ended up sleeping at his house. The bar has hosted countless skate video premieres and raised money many times for the skatepark at FDR Park, where a section known as the Mom’s Bowl is worth seeing for the skating and the art alike. In 2001 and 2002, when Philadelphia hosted the X Games, TMoms became the unofficial party base for the skaters, BMX riders and their crews. Perry admitted that hearing Tony Hawk compliment the place made the thirteen-year-old skater in him lose his cool a little.

The next twenty years

Asked what he expects from the next two decades, Perry said he is grateful for twenty years of love and good times and would happily keep going for another twenty, and another twenty after that. He hopes TMoms stays a home for misfits, dreamers, schemers and lovers. The bar’s past, present and future, he said, are one large collaboration made by everyone who walks in: a canvas already crowded with the marks of everyone before, with room to add your own. He wants to keep exploring the ground between the street and the gallery, and hopes the wider culture keeps making room for places like his, so that TMoms, like the Magic Gardens, can become a living museum that changes constantly and anchors every kind of community.

Mather’s last question was for some advice of his own. Perry’s reply was to let it flow and to trust yourself first and always, and he added, with a smile, to try not to be as long-winded in interviews as he had been. He signed off with thanks to Mather for always coming by and adding another layer to the walls, and with an aloha and mahalo.