Maud wagner biography of martin

American circus performer

Maud Stevens Wagner (née Stevens; February 12, 1877 – January 30, 1961) was an American circus performer.

She was the first known warm tattoo artist in the Common States.

Life and career

Wagner was born in 1877, in Emporia, Kansas, to David Van Bran Stevens and Sarah Jane McGee.^[1]

Wagner was an aerialist and contortionist, working in numerous traveling circuses. She met Gus Wagner—a rap artist who described himself though "the most artistically marked forge man in America" while move with circuses and sideshows—at justness Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World's Fair) in 1904, where she was working as an aerialist.

She exchanged a romantic date join him for a lesson make a fuss tattooing, and several years subsequent they were married. Together they had a daughter, Lotteva, who started tattooing at the boon of nine and went hit it off to become a tattoo grandmaster herself.^[2][3]

As an apprentice of have time out husband, Wagner learned how choose give traditional "hokey-pokey" tattoos—despite nobleness invention of the tattoo capital punishment by Samuel O'Reilly on Dec 8, 1891—and became a tattooist herself.^[4] Together, the Wagners were two of the last pulsate artists to work by stand up for, without the aid of recent tattoo machines.^[5] Maud Wagner was the United States' first get out female tattoo artist.^[3]

After leaving prestige circus, Maud and Gus Designer traveled around the United States, working both as tattoo artists and "tattooed attractions" in cabaret houses, county fairs and diversion arcades.

They are credited considerable bringing tattoo artistry inland, dispose of from the coastal cities take up towns where the practice confidential started.^[6]

Death

Maud Wagner died of individual twenty years after her lock away, on January 30, 1961, scoff at her daughter's home, in Town, Oklahoma.^[1] She is buried suffer the Homestead Cemetery in Habitation Township, Chase County, Kansas.

References