Art car culture rolling here
car parade preview at Discovery Green where roughly 50 cars were on display. “It was through my children’s teenage years. It was all a very difficult, five-year period and when that was all over, it was like we just came out of the darkness and the sadness and did this car. We had so much fun.”
Last summer, Maulsby and her two daughters drove the car to Seattle.
“We camped along the way, spreading smiles everywhere we went,” she said. “It’s one of those things that’s very meaningful to me and my family. … That’s icing on the cake that it brings other people joy.”
There are many such origin stories among the art-car crowd, a close-knit community of both dedicated artists and recreational fans who come together throughout the year for meet-ups, meals and events.
“The thing is that people who are in the art-car club and the people who have art cars in Houston, they’re just great people. They’re people who aren’t afraid to express themselves,” said Randy Blair, whose glass-and-longhorn-and-trinket bedecked Toyota Yaris looks like something out of a cross between “Mad Max: Fury Road” and an upended toy box. “They’ll send an email (saying) ‘Everybody meet at the Sonic on Washington on Sunday at 2’ and all these art cars will show up.”
Blair has been bringing his car to the parade since 2009 and every year, his little car gets a little more elaborate with a Darth Vader head here, a Daffy Duck there. For Blair, a private chef by trade, the artcar bug bit him after he developed an interest in glassmaking a decade ago. He started transforming the interior of his car over the course of two years and then began working on the exterior.
“I didn’t do it with the goal of ‘I’m going to be in the Art Car Parade,’ ” he said. “(But) people started stopping me, saying ‘Are you in the parade?’ I thought, ‘Maybe I should look into this parade thing’.”
Aurora Porschie Alice
Nicole Strine and Ben Gibson, whose psychedelic Aurora Porschie Alice will be the car mayor Sylvester Turner rides in on Saturday, met, fell in love and got married through their involvement in the art-car community. But the family connection goes even deeper than that.
The Porsche Boxster’s colorful cladding is inspired by a similarly striped plaque Strine’s father received in 1971 for winning a Porsche race. “He won this award from the Porsche Club and I always loved it,” said Strine, who recruited artist Robynn Sanders — who has designed art cars for Houston’s St. Arnold Brewery — to transform the car.
The result is so impressive that the prestigious Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, where someone there caught what Sanders was doing on Instagram, wants to put the car on display, and Strine is happy to oblige.
After all, Strine and Gibson have three other art cars, including a Honda wrapped in what looks like cracked glass and bears the name Shattered Vanity. That one is also in this year’s parade.
For Cason Hancock, a senior at Houston’s Carnegie Vanguard High School, the parade is a chance to make a statement about the environment. As part of a school project, funded by a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, he and up to 15 other students transformed a Nissan Maxima into a vehicle showing the perils of single-use plastic. Disposable water bottles are stacked on the roof in the shape of an ocean wave but it doesn’t stop there in the surf-and-sand-themed design.
“We have bottle caps on the turtles and we have single-use plastics in the cooler,” he pointed out.
This is the first year that retired photographer Ken Hoge will take part in the parade, though he has been “an art car groupie” for seven years, he says.
Now, he has taken the plunge, turning his Hyundai Sonata into a celebration of cats, Texas and rhinestones with the license plate blaring “Catboy.” His car was even used as part of the “Horn Concerto,” a musical piece written for car horns and performed on Thursday night.
“The hardest thing was coming up with a theme,” he said of how he came up with the design. “I’m thinking ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ and I was looking at cats on the internet, like we all do, and I went, ‘Wait a minute! Cat, cow, rhinestone catboy. It’s got cats, rhinestones, Texas, all the things I love.”
Everyday car, too
While the art cars are mere diversions for some participants, Hoge’s is a daily driver. “So, you’ll see me out there going to Kroger,” he said. “The biggest change in my life has been if I start to become an ugly driver, I realize I’m in a very memorable car — and it looks like a friendly car — so it’s done wonders for my road rage.”
One of Hoge’s friends, writer and retired IT professional Ed Draper, has even written a script partly inspired by the art-car subculture. Called “Recharge,” it’s set in a tumbledown future Houston where everyone has moved out of homes and into cars. Fort Worth-based producer Tom Huckabee, who came down for the parade, said he’s interested in getting involved and could be found Thursday taking photos and talking to participants. He’s impressed with the art-car scene here.
Randy Blair is at a loss to explain why art-car culture and the parade, sponsored by The Orange Show Center for Visionary Art and reportedly the largest art-car parade in the world, have found such a connection in Houston. “The funny thing about Houston is a lot of times people will stop you (when in your car) and say, ‘Are you from Austin’?,” Blair said with a laugh. “The keep-Austin-weird thing is just a myth. People from Austin come here to Houston, learn how to be weird, and then take it back to Austin.”