Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, Robert Williams, and others
Organized by the Laguna Art Musem and curated by C.R.Stecyk and Bolton Coburn, Kustom Kulture was a timely and important artistic and cultural reckoning/celebration about three select progenitors of the So. Cal Hot Rod scene and considered a group of artists who were influenced by their renegrade aesthetic. Kustom Kulture marked the (un)official beginning of what became known now as lowbrow art, the unruly sibling to the more established art world offerings. Its precedents included underground comics, psychedelic posters, hot rod culture, the Light and Space art movement, self-taught and unrecognized artists, and more. Craig Stecyk referred the movement’s beginning as a ‘sub-species’ and to some extent, the original lowbrow artists delighted in their ‘outsider’ status (until the works entered the commercial gallery system). Craftmanship triumphed over ideology.
A little background: A year before the exhibition opened in Laguna in the Summer, 1993, I saw a show of Robert Williams' version of mind-blowing surrealist and history painints at the Bess Cutler gallery in NYC. Recently, in my research into peripheries of the art world, I read about a small show of Roth's work at the New Langton Arts Center in San Francisco (1990), curated by artist and board member Randy Hussong. Roth hadn't been on my radar for decades but he now caught my re-attention. Immediately, I wanted to put Roth and Williams together, unaware of their history. Cutler suggested I speak with a So. Cal collector named Greg Escalante. When I spoke with Greg and mentioned my idea, he just started laughing. He said that he was on the board at the Laguna Art Museum and they were discussing early plans to do the same. Hearing that, I put the 'brakes' on my idea and told Escalante that we should work together to bring the show to the MD. Institute, College of Art. It should be noted that Huntington Beach Art Center celebrated and updated the original show twenty years later, curated by Escalante and Stecyk. The City of Baltimore's summer Artscape festival began showing art cars every year since, after the exhibition at MICA.
Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth, The Outlaw
The presentation at Laguna included additional works from the museum's collection, along with some vehicles lent by local collectors. Most of those items did not travel to Baltimore. A MICA alum, Karl Ardo, was influential in introducting me to many artists/builders in their garage/studios from the Mid-Atlantic region. Together we selected five cars to include in the show. After 30 days of phone calls, we secured Roth's magnifiecent Outlaw (one of the fist fiber-glassed body cars made in the US) from a collector in FL. We commissioned exhibiting artist Suzanne Williams to 'curate' a playlist of hot rod music. We designed and installed a wall hung 8-track audio system in the gallery for visitors to access. The exhibition staff secured a life-size plaster cast of the Venus de Milo from the school's Main building, the night before the opening, and we carried her to one of the galleries and drapped a rat fink T-shirt on her. We commissioned Ron Borkoskia, a regional custom car builder and pinstriper to ‘stripe’ several walls, display cases, light switches, one of the exhibited cars, and arranged for Ron to led a seminar for the graduate painters.
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MICA Kustom Kulture printed invitation
Von Dutch pinstripping a vehicle
Anthony Ausgang, doors from Ninth Life
DRESSED IN MONOCHROMATIC paint and shaped to please a wind tunnel rather than the eye, today's cars make it easy to forget the frenzied art that was sparked by the rediscovered automobile of post-World War II America. The car had just come back then, and the country was hungry for it. Hungry, too, to make it personal. And a traveling exhibition, in the heart of Baltimore at the moment, brings it all back, with a sampling of the era's wild vehicles and the "customized" paintings blazoned on their bodies. (excerpt from a NY Times article, Jan 19, 1994)
