Let
it ride

A 12-foot skeleton sits atop a red-and-black sedan. A larger-than-life banana motors by on four wheels. Hundreds of seashells, buttons, and horse figurines decorate a 1972 Cadillac El Dorado. Every April, a carnival of weird cruises through the streets of Houston for the annual Art Car Parade.

The tradition of gussying up a car with paint and baubles goes back to the late 1970s and early 1980s—a “transformative time in Houston’s art scene,” says Jonathan Beitler, former chief operating officer of the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, which puts on the annual Art Car Parade. The Orange Show, which started as a folk art installation built by postal worker Jeff Davis McKissack and has evolved into a multi-site art center and nonprofit, is just one of many outsider art institutions in Houston. The city is also home to Diverse Works, a multidisciplinary arts nonprofit founded in 1982; junk art installations like the Cactus King; and the glittering Beer Can House.

Art cars debuted in Houston in 1984, when the late artist and donor Ann Harithas curated a show at Lawndale Art Center called Collision that featured two art cars, including Larry Fuente’s Mad Cad, a 1967 Cadillac affixed with teddy bears, bowling trophies, and dolls. The exhibit helped legitimize this avant-garde medium. “It was one of the first times that people in an institution had recognized art cars as a form of contemporary art that should be exhibited,” Beitler says. The seminal show ushered in a wave of artists buying and transforming cheap vehicles into roving canvases.

The first Art Car Parade, then known as the New Music Parade, happened two years later, when a handful of cars chugged through Montrose in conjunction with the New Music America Festival. It featured about 20 artist floats and art cars. Rebecca Bass, an artist and the Orange Show’s art car education manager, remembers the first celebration as an intimate and casual affair. But it grew steadily, especially once the Orange Show got involved the following year. The 1989 Art Car Parade featured roughly 60 cars, she recalls. “And we thought that was a lot,” Bass says. “Now there are almost 300.”

Last year’s parade included a tie-dye hearse, a car crafted from a retrofitted Porta Potty, and a gigantic chicken forged from sheet metal, complete with a movable beak. Photographer Arturo Olmos, who hails from Houston, had never attended the Art Car Parade before venturing to the 2024 event. He trained his camera lens not just on the fabulous vehicles, but also on the people who built them. “These cars don’t just roll off a car dealership lot; there are always people behind them,” he says. “It’s easy to be hyperfocused on the cars, but without that context, we wouldn’t really understand what the Art Car Parade is about.”

The community surrounding art cars is as important to longtime artists as the materials they use to create their unconventional whips. When Bass first started buying up junk cars decades ago, fellow hobbyists helped her navigate mechanical issues that cropped up. Now, Bass, who long taught a Houston ISD art car class, advises students on how to convert their wildest ideas into actionable art. For the 2016 parade, she helped a Reagan High School class build sculptures, a torch, and mosaics for their Jimi Hendrix-themed art car Electric Ladyland.

Many artists don’t wait until Art Car Parade weekend to trot out their wares, though. For some, like Houstonian Darcy Creswell, these idiosyncratic cars also function as their day-to-day vehicles. Creswell converted her finicky 1979 Subaru Brat into a surrealist oceanic wonder with a giant octopus atop the hood, its brains spilling over. “People stay out of your way when you’re driving down the freeway with a massive brain stuck to the top of your car with a leprechaun hat on top for St. Patrick’s Day,” Creswell laughs.

While the size of the Houston Art Car Parade has surged over the years, its underlying spirit hasn’t wavered since that initial impromptu gathering in Montrose. “It’s not as grassroots as it was, but it’s still part of the fabric of Houston and how quirky we are,” Bass says. “I know Austin tries to advertise how weird they are, but we’ve just been sitting over here being weird all this time.”
—Paula Mejía