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The Artcar Museum is a private institution dedicated to contemporary art. It’s an exhibition forum for local, national, and international artists. Its emphasis is on art cars, other fine arts, and artists that are rarely, if ever, acknowledged by other cultural institutions. The museum’s goal is to encourage the public is awareness of the cultural, political, economic, and personal dimensions of art.
The Artcar Museum, or ‘Garage Mahal’ as many know it, opened in February 1998. It was founded by Ann Harithas, artist and long-time supporter of the Art Car movement, and James Harithas, former director of the Corcoran Museum, Washington, D.C., the Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York, and the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Texas. The Museum features the most imaginative, elaborate, and artfully constructed art cars, low riders, and mobile contraptions, as well as displaying exhibitions of art by local, national, and international artists of all media. It espouses an aesthetic that draws from the traditions of both fine and public art. The Museum has its conceptual origins in the 1984 Collision Show at the Lawndale Art Center which saw the unveiling of Larry Fuente’s Mad Cad, which has since been featured in museums and cultural institutions across the country. As a result of the popularity of this show, art car workshops were founded in Houston, which eventually precipitated the Art Car Parade and the Art Car movement as we know it today.
The Museum showroom celebrates the spirit of this post-modern age of car-culture, in which individuals have remolded the factory-model sameness of their automobiles to the specifications of their own idiosyncratic images and visions. Whether a Cadillac, Chevrolet, Volkswagen, or Ford, no model or make can outrun the Art Car Movement. Car artist David Best created the Museum’s distinctive scrap-metal and chrome exterior. Like the art cars it shelters, the building aspires to transcend the corporate codes of utilitarianism which allow us only to apprehend beauty when it ekes out in service of a product. Whereas the peak of New York’s Chrysler building resembles nothing so much as a stylized cog or hubcap, the roof of Houston’s Artcar Museum evokes a Byzantine temple and its silvery carport provides an agora for people to meet beneath the giant Texas sky and the star of solidarity.
Michael-Ann Belin |
Everytime I visit the Art Car Museum I walk away feeling like I have tapped into an underground-mainline of what the true nature of art is all about. Without fail, I leave inspired to create something. (2006-07-17 10:18:48) |
