Houston’s Zany Art Car Parade Comes of Age

In the early days, when Max the Daredevil Finmobile first roamed Houston’s streets, the mammoth manta-ray-like beast had little company. On Saturday, though, the cars behind Max stretched for miles.

There were dreams-made-metal by kids crazy for lowriders, a fruit-flecked paean to womanhood by an exotic dancer, and an ode to life--in antique coins--by a man who lived through risky surgery.

Launched 12 years ago by local artists, Houston’s annual Art Car Parade is today bigger, stranger, more diverse, and flush with money from the lifeblood of the city, oil. As it has developed, the parade--the only such event in the country--has become a reflection of the city’s soul.

“Every community wants to find that which is really special about it,” said musician and computer specialist Harry Leverette, who created Dusty the Dolphin, a reconfigured Volkswagen Beetle. “In Houston, this is it.”

The noisy promenade of 142 adorned cars, 15 refurbished classics, 6 lowrider clubs and 17 “contraptions” has become a pilgrimage event, attracting art car creators from as far away as Canada.

Houston is the country’s richest ground for both art cars and “environmental” art, in which homes and gardens are crafted into folk art by ordinary people, said Susanne Theis, director of the parade-sponsoring Orange Show Foundation.

“I think it has to do with our lack of zoning, our year-round good weather, and being at the crossroads of several cultures that celebrate idiosyncratic and individual expression,” she said. “There’s the eccentric that exists in Southern tradition, the western rugged individualist and the Mexican aesthetic that anything can be decorative.”

James Harithas, author of “Art Cars: Revolutionary Movement” (Ineri Foundation, 1997) and curator of Houston’s new Art Car Museum, also links the art cars to the city’s culture.

“We’re new, young, energetic and creative. Houston is, relatively speaking, a very young city,” Harithas said. “You wouldn’t expect New York, where the average age is over 40, to do something like this.”

The Art Car Parade speaks eloquently of Houston’s distinctive independence and entrepreneurship. It’s a city, after all, where most newcomers still hope to succeed economically--and where fewer taxes, zoning laws and social castes hamper their progress.

“It’s no coincidence that this [parade] occurs in Texas, the only state that was once a separate country,” Leverette said. Far-flung, devoid of subway or light rail, Houston is the Texas city most enmeshed with cars, he added. And though its economy is more complex than in the oil boom days, Houston still closely identifies with the old-time wildcatters and vast oil corporations.

It was that history with oil that saved the parade two years ago, when the event was forced to seek corporate sponsorship from Pennzoil to survive.

And it was a scrappy individual with an outsize vision who indirectly prompted the parade 45 years back.

That’s when postal worker Jeff McKissack received a strange revelation that the humble orange embodied high ideals of wholesomeness and health.

In response, McKissack spent 25 years rebuilding his home into a fanciful tribute to citrus, complete with statues, turrets, spires and placards. When he died six months after its completion, Houston art patrons created a private foundation to preserve the structure.

Now a promoter of folk art citywide, the Orange Show Foundation first launched the Art Car Parade as a fund-raiser. Starting with about two dozen cars, it now is an afternoon-long spectacle that includes cyclists and school clubs and offers about $10,000 in prizes.

Though some parade stalwarts still oppose the corporate connection, Houstonian pragmatism seemed to prevail this weekend. Art car creators spoke little about institutions, and much about their automotive dreams.

Artist Tom Kennedy, creator of the Finmobile, a massive two-finned creature fused to an old Dodge van, reminisced about an art car-inspired bicycle parade he led in Bosnia during the war there. Now, he wants to drive the Finmobile through Russia.

“I’d love to remind them that we still like them there,” said 38-year-old Kennedy, a burly man in a pastel tie-dyed shirt. “What can you do with this art car magic? I dream of traveling and touring with art cars year-round.”

Art car creator Troy Cooper, 64, and his wife, Mamie, 58, drove from South Carolina with the car he had covered in his coin collection and costume jewelry in a two-month decorating binge in his garage.

Her husband miraculously survived heart surgery seven years ago, Mamie Cooper said, and this car was his response.

“He thinks God left him for a purpose,” she said as they prepared to parade the old Toyota with the other art cars beside downtown’s Buffalo Bayou. “This might be it. To make the car and make other people happy.”