Carmada takes place Sat. Sept. 27, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Duke Energy Center for the Arts Plaza (betw. the Dali and the Mahaffey), St. Petersburg, facebook.com/carmadaFL
“There are a lot of moving parts,” laughs Mitzi Gordon, executive director of Creative Pinellas, the county arts agency. She’s talking about the growing complexity of the art-car showcase Carmada, which pulls into the plaza next to the Dalì Museum this Saturday.
If Gordon’s remark is a pun on the spinny things that make a car work (confession: I don’t know much about cars), it also has a third, bigger meaning: Carmada, which debuted at the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts in February, is the product of a complicated machinery of influence and collaboration, its story linking artists across the Bay in struggle, inspiration, and even romance.
People across America have been turning cars into personal statements since the dawn of lowriders and hot rods in the 1940s. But the loose spirit of today’s art car subculture can be traced most directly back to the psychedelic VWs and buses of the 1960s, most notably to the moving headquarters of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the bus known as Furthur. The ethos of wheeled bohemia rolls on today through the Black Rock Desert, where Burning Man regularly features everything from mechanical car-animals to postapocalyptic mobile DJ booths.
Saturday’s Carmada won’t be quite that extreme, but it will feature eight art cars, two buses, several food trucks, and a transforming beast known as the Red Bull Urban Rhythm DJ Truck. Two cars will also be painted live over the course of the event, which coincides with Free Museum Day, meaning Pinellas residents can step next door to take a gratis stroll through the Dalì Museum. The main goal of the event is to promote the State of the Arts license plate, whose fees provide about $30,000 each year in Pinellas County arts funding.
“My whole life I’ve been fascinated by unusual vehicles,” says Gordon, who remembers marveling as a child at Dr. Teeth’s Furthur-inspired bus in the original Muppet Movie. “I’ve always had this interest in the mobile, freedom, being able to move.”
Acting on that interest, she lived out of her car and wandered the U.S. for three months after college. She went on to a career as an arts promoter and administrator, including at the Dalì, then connected her two passions when she launched the Bluebird Books Bus in 2011. Though it’s taken a back seat (ahem) to her new duties as a full-time administrator, the Bluebird still takes advantage of its mobility by collecting donations of books and getting them into the hands of eager readers. Gordon worked with local artist Joe Griffith to paint the bus, making it her first art car.
At around the same time, a small group of St. Pete artists were building art-car momentum on their own. Artist Derek Donnelly says that the first spray-painted car in St. Pete was his, transformed with help from muralist Sebastian Coolidge and the gallerist and painter James Oleson. “We painted it in front of the gallery during Artwalk,” he says, referring to his former 600 block space, Saint Paint. “[We were motivated by] being hungry as local artists, trying to get things out there, showcasing our art on something that was moving around.”
Those early pieces have fed a growing flow of commissions for him and Coolidge, including food trucks, delivery vehicles, and a lawn care truck. “I painted giant blades of grass on it,” says Donnelly, “like, Honey I Shrunk the Kids style.”
Then there are the civilians. Stephen McKendree’s 2000 white Toyota Corolla was losing paint —“I thought, you know, it’s already a canvas”— so he volunteered it for the show.
“I guess you could say I’m a little bit of an anarchist,” says McKendree. “So I really enjoy that disruptive effect.”
Mitzi Gordon enjoys a little disruption, too. She worked with the artist Hunter Payne in 2013 to transform her own small Scion into a kind of cartoon blueprint, and now she gets flagged down frequently by excited gawkers — not always under the safest circumstances. “I’ll be on 275 going 60 miles an hour, and someone paces me and rolls down their window and starts shouting questions,” Gordon says. “They’ll ask me, ‘What is it?’ and I answer: ‘It’s art!’”
Those moments of surprise hint at the bigger potential of art cars in St. Pete: Gordon thinks a little spraypaint might help people take a second look at life behind the wheel. “It’s a car culture,” says Gordon, “[But] let’s take this thing and change how people look at it.” She hopes future Carmada events will showcase electric and other alternative-power vehicles, “not just alternative color.”
Chicago returnee Carrie Boucher (pronounced Boo-Shay) started her Nomad mobile art studio earlier this year to help address other transportation-related issues in the Bay Area. After a sometimes-frustrating year teaching art in Florida public schools, she decided to build an art studio that could provide more accessible art education for those that needed it most. She decided, inspired partly by the Bluebird Books Bus, to make it roll. “There are a lot of people with transportation issues [in Tampa Bay]. I put it on a bus so that we could go into the neighborhoods and reach people.” The Nomad bus, whose outside surface serves as a free-for-all canvas, will be the largest vehicle at Carmada.
There’s one more big, heartwarming cog at the center of Carmada’s connected machinery. James Oleson and his crew were well along the path to building an art car mini-empire when they heard about the first Carmada, and they knew they had to reach out to the kindred spirit who organized it. But after Oleson and Gordon connected over art cars, they found they had a lot of other things to connect over. They’re now partners in art and life. Oleson is re-painting the Bluebird Books Bus for its reappearance at Carmada, showing that love and spraypaint share powerful transformative qualities.
“It’s brought some interesting things into my life,” says Gordon of her automotive arts adventure. “It’s a great feeling.”