Are Art Cars a Houston Thing?
I went to the Art Car Parade yesterday. I’ve been going for years (although COVID shut the parade down for two years). Where I live now, I can walk to the parade route, the weather was fantastic, so why not? Many thoughts run through my mind when I approach the Art Car parade. Like given the history of Art Cars, is this a Houston phenomenon? (Answer, no. I’ve noticed that there will be some notable aspect of Houston and Texas that we Houstonians and Texans get mildly possessive of only to discover that is is actually universal. For example, the apartment complex design that became known locally as “the Texas doughnut”—this very common kind of apartment building is actually everywhere, but I guess Houstonians and Texans have such a desire to have some kind of regional identity within a rapidly homogenizing suburban nation that we claimed it for ourselves.)
I’d be interested in reading a history of the “art car”. You can get glimpses of this history in two books by Pete Gershon, who now works for the Orange Show (which puts on the Art Car Parade every year.) The books are Collision and Impractical Spaces: Houston, both of which I heartily recommend. But while art car parades have occurred in Houston since 1987, the idea of decorating cars has been around probably since shortly after the first cars were manufactured. A real history of “art cars” would include all those creative people who didn’t think of themselves as artists. The eccentric car owners, the car customizers, etc. There is a famous sequence in Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees where artist Robert Irwin has an argument with an art critic over whether a customized car the two had just seen was art or not.
And when I look at art cars, I automatically start classifying what I see mentally. There are art cars that required doing something to an already existing car—like a paint job or hot-gluing things to it. Then there are cars that have been physically transformed. And finally, there are mobile objects that may never have been cars in the first place. Also, one might notice how this event has gone from being a bunch of funky artists to being a community event where a large percentage of the cars on parade are created by schools as class projects
But I am not going to dive down any of those rabbit-holes. Instead, here are a bunch of photographs I took yesterday. I have arranged more-or-less by extremity of automotive transformation, from least transformed to most.
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