Art car  

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An art car is a vehicle that has had its appearance modified as an act of personal artistic expression . Art cars are often driven and owned by their creators, who are sometimes referred to as "Cartists".

History

The art car subculture started with several influences - the hippie-themed VWs of the late 1960s, the lowrider, as well as a Merry Pranksters' creation, the decorated school bus known as Furthur.

During the late 1960s, singer Janis Joplin had a psychedelically-painted Porsche 356 and John Lennon, a paisley Rolls Royce. Partly in imitation, the late 1960s/early 1970s counterculture featured many painted VW Buses (sometimes with a peace symbol in place of the giant VW logo) and customized vehicles (e.g. a customized 1977 Cadillac Fleetwood seen in the film Escape from New York). Likewise, as a way of evading The Muppet Movie's main antagonist "Doc Hopper", Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem paint up the borrowed 1951 "bullet-nose" Studebaker Commander two-door owned by Fozzie Bear's uncle in a psychedelic manner, for Fozzie and Kermit the Frog to escape safely, at least for a while.

Artist Larry Fuente was among the first to take motorized appliqué to the limit with his "Mad Cad." Later, artists David Best and Jackie Harris contributed their works to the art car world.

An art car community began to cohere in the 1990s, inspired by movies and books with a wide underground following, and the development of innovative art display venues such as Burning Man. One of the main forces behind this is filmmaker and art car artist Harrod Blank, who created the art car documentaries Wild Wheels (1992), Driving The Dream (1998) and Automorphosis (2009). He also published two books Wild Wheels (1993, 2001) and Art Cars: the cars, the artists, the obsession, the craft (2002, 2007, 2012) Blank also co-founded with Philo Northrup the U.S.'s second largest art car festival in the San Francisco Bay Area: ArtCar Fest. Today many cars are covered by local newspapers and media. The only real way to get an idea of what is out there is to simply hit the road or attend an art car event. A New Year's Eve event in Houston, Texas, held on 31 December 2010 had over 100 Illuminated entrants, it is titled Gloworama, produced by ArtX (formerly Art Cars of Houston LLC prior to 2013 - their events are limited to illuminated vehicles only). The illuminated parade also drew the attention of the Galveston, Texas-based business empire Yaga's Entertainment, Inc. (the contract holder of Mardi Gras! Galveston 2011–2015) as part of their five-year contract signed on 18 November 2010.

A well known early art car used for commercial advertisement was the Oscar Mayer Wienie Wagon—Later versions were known as the Wienermobile. These are bus-sized vehicles styled to appear as a hot dog on a bun. Commercial use of the art car has become popular in the 20th and continues into the 21st century. At the same time visionary applications including cars transformed into religious shrines continues to place visionary self-taught artists, student artists and corporate artists side by side on the road and at art car events.

The art car culture was once strongest throughout Texas and the Southeast but now it extends throughout the United States and art car events can be found in many major cities as well as in small country towns. Art cars now very evident in the East, with a large event often held in Baltimore. In Canada, art cars are popular in British Columbia and also in the western Canadian plains with shows in Nanaimo, British Columbia and Regina, Saskatchewan. Other cars can be found throughout the world, most recently in Europe with the European arm of car-hire firm Avis supporting the movement.

Car art

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Art car" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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