Long Live the Art Car Museum
Among the least surprising Houston art news to reach me lately is the news that the Art Car Museum is closing down. This was a private museum founded by in 1998 by James and Ann Harithas, both of whom died in 2022 and 2021.
The pair did not make arrangements for the museum to continue indefinitely. I tend to see museums as public monuments that will last as for many lifetimes. But this is obviously not true, I assume that James and Ann Harithas weren’t attempting to create eternal monuments to themselves by founding the Art Car Museum and the Station Museum.
I’ve seen a few really memorable shows at the Art Car Museum. Mark David Bradford, whose nom de art car is “Scrapdaddy” had a memorable exhibit in 2011. The best exhibit I saw at the Art Car Museum was Kindred Spirits in 2014, a beautiful exhibit of local “outsider art.”
The Art Car Museum is the kind of eccentric, hyper-local art institution that helps makes a place uniquely what it is. I’ll miss it.
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I will miss this museum too. Saw some very interesting art there, again and again.