The Houston Art Car Parade: Americana Icon

Dylan Thuras: A couple of months ago, during one of our normal podcast pitch meetings, producer Gabby Gladney suggested an idea for an episode about this parade that she grew up going to. And I immediately shouted in delight.

Gabby Gladney: I suggested doing an episode about the Art Car Parade in Houston because that is where I’m from. I grew up going to the Art Car Parade every year, and I was not expecting anyone to really know what it was, but you did.

Dylan: Well, I just got immediately all pumped up and started shouting because I’m from Minneapolis and we also have an Art Car Parade, and I grew up in an art car house. We made a couple of art cars when I was a kid, and those were our cars. We drove them around. So I was immediately super excited.

Art cars are pretty self-explanatory. They’re cars that have been transformed in some artistic way. Sometimes they are painted, sometimes they’re sculptural. Sometimes people take these cars they’ve made and then put them into a parade, one of these Art Car Parades that take place across the country.

I have a ton of affection for art cars, but it’s been a long time since I’d really thought a lot about them, about why my family made the ones that we made, and more deeply about how art cars and art car culture even got started. So I decided to call up the person who introduced me to the whole thing.

Hi, Dad.

Dylan’s Dad: Hello!

I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. In the first half of today’s episode, I’m talking with Gabby Gladney about the origin of art car culture and how her hometown of Houston became the mecca of art cars. It is home to the largest Art Car Parade in the country. And then I chat with Dad about our family history, about our art cars. We talk a little bit about some of the art cars we are hoping to make in the future.

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Gabby: What’s the car that you remember the most, the art car that your family was involved with?

Dylan: My mom was teaching Sunday school. We went to a hippie-dippie Christian church. And for whatever reason, as part of that, an activity she created was we’re going to paint fish on the car. I don’t think it was like Christian fish. I think it was just like an underwater scene.

As part of that, we just painted some fish on the car, just like it was an old, slowly dying Subaru, like a 1980s Subaru. And so that’s how it started. And then it actually evolved over time. It was pretty ugly, to be honest, like the fish were not good. It looked like a bunch of kids painted their versions of fish on the side of a car. And later we repainted it. That was the first art car.

Gabby: Would you classify your parents as hippies?

Dylan: They’re younger than hippies are. So they’re not truly of that generation, really. But they were a little countercultural, I guess I would say. And then Minneapolis was a place that was also kind of a countercultural city. Like Houston, it had a strain of counterculturalism in it that was sort of a welcoming of being a little bit artsy-fartsy.

Gabby: Yeah, yeah. I ask because when people try to draw the history timeline of art car, where it started, a lot of it goes back to the ’60s and the ’70s. Some famous people had art cars, Janis Joplin, John Lennon, like a psychedelic Rolls Royce.

Dylan: You think about the painted V.W. bus, you know what I mean? You think about these kind of hippie buses on their like great journeys across the country.

Today, Houston is widely considered the epicenter of the art car movement. But it took a few decades for art cars to make their way there. The Houston art car scene started back in the ’90s with a couple named James and Ann Harithas. James Harithas had worked in museums for decades at that point, with long stints in Arizona and New York.

And he came to Houston for a challenge. He was told the city was too outside of the mainstream art world for him to have a successful art career there. But Harithas wasn’t daunted, and in 1998, he opened the Art Car Museum.

I think it’s interesting that the Houston movement also really, in a way, even though it has older roots, flourished in the ’90s, like they started the Art Car Museum in the ’90s. I feel like the ’90s—which is also when we were making our art cars—they were this kind of this heavy subcultural expression time, like slacker, Gen X, Nirvana, grunge. Like there was all this stuff that was kind of similar to the ’60s and ’70s in this idea of like radical self-expression, and both an innocent and yet still kind of radical way of stating, I have a different approach to kind of living in our materialist culture.

Gabby: Harithas had a philosophy about art cars and thinking about them as radical self-expression. He wrote a manifesto, actually, that is still displayed in the Art Car Museum.

Dylan: I would love to hear the Art Car Manifesto.

Gabby: Get into the left lane and aim high, but keep one eye on the rear view mirror for black and whites. Art cars are a grassroots movement. Change your vehicle, improve it, personalize it, and make your own statement with it so that you can once again become one with it. Art cars are an expression of your freedom and above all of the God-given American right to be yourself and flaunt it on the highways and byways of America.

Dylan: One person who helped art car culture explode was a guy named Harrod Blank. He was a documentarian and an art car super freak. He made three films about art cars, one of which heavily focused on the Houston scene. Blank also went on to found the San Francisco Art Car Parade, the second largest Art Car Parade in the country.

Gabby: Him taking that movie across the country and showing it in other places, it spread the word that Houston was one of the few places at that time that had a scene at all. People traveled and it grows year after year after year. It’s car central, right? So it’s kind of not surprising that it became this hometown for the scene because everybody has to have a car.

So I think a lot of the artist’s idea was like, if you have to have this, you might as well do whatever you can with it and make it as crazy, as exciting, as fun as you possibly could. There’s also subcultures within the art car kind of realm. And they’ve actually started incorporating more of what we call slab culture.

Dylan: I was going to talk about slab cars because that’s like a Houston specific car culture. Like it doesn’t really …

Gabby: Very specific.

Dylan: It’s so—I’m so glad you brought that up. Okay. Tell me a little bit about slab cars.

Gabby: Yeah. So it’s actually kind of debated where the term slab, like what it refers to, what it means. Some people say the slab is like the blacktop concrete that you would have like these car shows in the parking lot. Others say it’s like an acronym for slow, loud and banging, which is like how you would describe the car.

But usually what they are is candy painted, like bright red, bright blue, bright purple colors, extended wire rims, they’re fixed to be low riders. And usually they also have giant speaker sets in their trunk. So they’re very associated with hip hop, rap culture, specifically the Houston rap scene. And in recent years, they’re part of the Art Car Parade. There’s awards for the best slab car. So there’s been some merging. It’s another example of using your car as a way to show off.

Dylan: Yeah. I think Houston combines both real car culture, right? It’s had a big car culture for a long time. And then this interesting strain of kind of weird outsider art. There’s a lot of weird outsider art in Houston, The Orange Show, the Beer Can House, these kind of weird, interesting things that are celebrated there. And so the merging of sort of little streams into art car culture makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s awesome that slab culture, which is more kind of a variant of low rider culture and art car stuff, are mixing in a kind of cultural way.

You know, I was thinking about this both in the case of Houston and Minneapolis, I think this is an example of what you might term like social contagion. Because when you see somebody else’s art car, or you see an Art Car Parade, some subsection of that audience says, “You know, I’ve got this old crummy car. Maybe it’s time I do something interesting with it.” It’s the kind of thing where once you create the permission structure—like art cars are a thing that can exist here in this place—it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because I think some set of people are excited to do that. It feels like a really fun opportunity. And so I’m, I feel like it’s a sign of something good about a city, like a city with a thriving art car scene or an Art Car Parade, like something good is happening in that place.

Gabby: I would have to agree. And I think too, in terms of how it will continue to evolve over time, a lot of people become artists because they’re exposed to these different things that your city promotes. So I think for sure it’ll continue on. And hopefully that there’ll be art cars for years to come, decades to come.

Dylan: So I got my dad on the phone to chat about these art cars, to remember why we even made them in the first place. I mentioned earlier that my family’s first art car experience came when my mom wanted to paint some fish on the family Subaru. It was not the best paint job, but it was the beginning of our art car saga.

Dylan’s Dad: It was in several Art Car Parades. It was in several Art Car Parades, one featuring your grandmother as a mermaid on the roof.

Dylan: How was grandma secured on the roof?

Dylan’s Dad: She was just sort of hanging on. We were not driving very fast, you know, cause it was a parade.

Dylan: That car was the first, but it was not the last. The fish car eventually died. And then a family member gave us what’s called an old kei car.

Dylan’s Dad: A kei car was like, it was, it was a car that Chrysler made in the 1980s. It was a sort of a generic boxy car.

Dylan: Extremely boxy. I remember this car.

Dylan’s Dad: Yeah. It’s very, very boxy.

Dylan: So boxy here as a way of saying it was extremely ugly. At the same time, my uncle was working at a legal publishing company and they would run all these misprints. They would have all these rejected CDs that had legal documents that had, you know, something had gotten screwed up. So thousands of extra CDs with no purpose, basically headed for the trash. Very ugly, very boxy car. I think you can see where this is headed.

Dylan’s Dad: The idea just clicked of basically making another art car by gluing the CDs on the car. So what we did is I got bags and bags of these CDs. And then I got a bunch of tubes of liquid nails, you know, construction adhesive, and basically glued them all over the car.

Dylan: This is like a much more audacious art car than the first one. Because the first one was a paint job. This is edging into sculpture territory.

Dylan’s Dad: This is taking it into a different level. But the car was so damn ugly, you know, it’s like, well, shoot, why not? I can’t remember if I did some paint underneath it. I think I probably did. And then I think I glued, I think I counted something like, at one point, the car had 500 CDs on it. So we’re talking about the hood, the roof, the sides, the trunk, everything, every flat surface that could hold.

Dylan: Edge to edge.

Dylan’s Dad: Edge to edge. The thing was completely covered, shiny side out, you know. And so it was maybe a little bit of a hazard when it was really sunny. We drove that car on it not very often because the car was terrible. I mean, the car handled just horribly. It was not a good car, but it wouldn’t die. It would not die. Once in a while, I would drive that car to work.

Dylan: That was a recognizable car.

Dylan’s Dad: It was a very recognizable car. And I would always keep a spare bag of CDs in the trunk with spare adhesive because periodically, they would just fall off. Something would happen. Or people would take them off thinking that they were a good CD and then find out that there’s like Massachusetts, you know, legal—

Dylan: Legal documents. Yeah. I think people would. I think curiosity killed people because they were shiny side out. So I think people were like, what CDs are they putting on it?

Dylan’s Dad: That’s right. And so people would break them off and I would just basically replace them.

Dylan: Did you ever get pulled over for either—did you ever run into any kind of trouble with either of these cars?

Dylan’s Dad: We never got pulled over. And in fact, there was actually a—Southwest Journal was basically a neighborhood paper, did a little article on the art car once.

Dylan: And did you ever take that one into the Art Car Parade?

Dylan’s Dad: You know, I don’t think that one was ever in the parade. I don’t know why. It was just, it was never in the parade. And then finally that car was dying and we got a big snowstorm and I just let the city tow it away.

Dylan: Such is the death of an art car.

Dylan’s Dad: Yeah. This is what happens.

Dylan: They’re usually in the end of their life, not in the beginning of their life.

Dylan’s Dad: You don’t usually do this to a brand new car. There’s something great about art cars because this society is so car intensive. Cars are so important that to do that to your car is really subversive.

Dylan: Yeah.

Dylan’s Dad: And I thought, “Oh man, am I going to want all this attention?” But it’s sort of great. Because what you’re doing is so subversive to what we think about cars in this country. It’s like, “No, I don’t care about the paint. It doesn’t matter. I’m going to do this to a car. Stop me.”

Dylan: Yeah. And I think, and I think Minneapolis is a place that also is sort of supportive of this kind of subversion of things.

Dylan’s Dad: It is. I mean, when we lived in Southern California, I saw customized cars all the time, but I don’t think I ever saw an art car.

Dylan: Yeah. Am I correct in believing that you are pretty seriously contemplating making another art car?

Dylan’s Dad: We are very seriously contemplating turning another Subaru into an art car, perhaps with your children’s help. I think.

Dylan: Yes.

Dylan’s Dad: I think that’s pretty mandatory that they have a role in it.

Dylan: Yeah. Any ideas?

Dylan’s Dad: We were thinking of doing some sort of maybe stripe pattern on it and then having like a freeze running along the side, you know, like a panel, horizontal panel, and then letting, letting probably Finn and Jean each have a side and they could draw with like ink pens within the freeze.

Dylan: Oh, interesting. Well, good. I would like to continue the tradition. I think the art car tradition is a good one. It felt cool to be a kid in a house that had an art car. That was cool. It felt like, “Oh, we’re that kind of, that kind of family.”

Dylan’s Dad: Yeah. I think it would be really fun to do it again.

Dylan: If you have ever made an art car or participated in an Art Car Parade, please send us a picture. We would love to see it. If you have never even considered turning your vehicle into an art car, especially if you’ve got an older car, maybe at the end of its useful life, take this as a sign. You too can convert your junky old car into something brand new and delightful, uh, at least for a couple of years until it dies. All right. I’ll see you next time.

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This episode was produced by Gabby Gladney. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.