TOM of FINLAND x LA 'ACAB' 100th Anniversary - #76/100 Skateboard Skate Deck

Description

SOLD OUT rare Tom of Finland x Lethal Amounts skate deck
Touko Valio Laaksonen
(8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), best known by his pseudonym
Tom of Finland
, was a Finnish
artist known for his stylized highly masculinized homoerotic
art, and for his influence on late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade.
Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary
and secondary sex traits
, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
New York's Museum of Modern Art has acquired several examples of Laaksonen's artwork for its permanent collection. In 2006, MoMA in New York accepted five Tom of Finland drawings as part of a much larger gift from The Judith Rothschild Foundation. The trustee of The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Harvey S. Shipley Miller, said, "Tom of Finland is one of the five most influential artists of the twentieth century. As an artist he was superb, as an influence he was transcendent." Hudson, of Feature Inc., New York, placed Tom of Finland's work in the collections of
Rhode Island School of Design
Museum of Art and
Art Institute of Chicago
. His work is also in the public Collections of: The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, USA; Waino
A
atonen Museum of Art; Turku, Finland;
University of California Berkeley Art Museum
, Berkeley (California), USA;
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
, Los Angeles, USA;
Kiasma
, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
, San Francisco, USA; and Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles, USA.
In 1999, an exhibition took place at the Institut Culturel Finlandais (
Finnish
Cultural Centre) in Paris.
In 2011 there was a large retrospective exhibition of Laaksonen's artwork in Turku, Finland. The exhibition was one of the official events in Turku's European Capital of Culture program.
In 2012,
Kulturhuset
presented a retrospective,
Tom of Finland
, in Stockholm, Sweden; and Tom of Finland's work was in the Robert Rauschenburg Foundation's
We the People
in New York City, USA.
In 2013,
MOCA
presented
Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland
in Los Angeles, USA. The artist's work was also seen in
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
Galerie Perrotin
– 25 years
in Lille, France;
Leslie Lohman Museum's
Rare and Raw
in New York City, USA; and the
Institute of Contemporary Art
's
Keep Your Timber Limber (Works on Paper)
in London, England.
In 2015,
Artists Space
presented the exhibition "Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play" in New York City, USA. The exhibition was also presented in
Kunsthalle Helsinki
in 2016, complemented with additional material such as photos from family albums.
In 2020, as part of the 100th birthday celebrations, "Tom of Finland: Love and Liberation" at London's
House of Illustration
showed 40 originals with ephemera emphasizing fashion as an aspect of his work.