From ‘Cork Truck’ to ‘Garden-Rainbow-Space-Mushroom-Whatever’: The Minnesota ArtCars Parade Celebrates 30 Years
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In a Minneapolis parking lot, a group of 10 and 11-year-olds paint mushrooms and flowers on a Toyota hatchback. On the rims, they’re painting rainbows. The roof of the car is matte black — the beginning of a galaxy.
“The theme is garden-rainbow-space-mushroom-whatever!” a few of them yell, almost in unison.
“Don’t forget the rainbows,” one cautions.
Camp-goer Ivy Thompson is painting a sunflower near a rear tire.
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“It’s really weird,” Thompson says. “The main thing we’ve been taught about this sort of stuff is: Don’t paint on a car, don’t scratch up a car. Now they’re like, ‘Hey, kids, go scratch and paint the car.’”
This is ArtCar camp at Articulture, a nonprofit in the Seward neighborhood. Each year camp kids paint a car for the Minnesota ArtCars (and artbikes!) Parade around Lake Harriet, which celebrates its 30th anniversary on Saturday.
Take a car, decorate it, now it’s an art car!
The tradition of art cars — take a car, decorate it, now it’s an art car! — is often credited to hippies in the ‘60s, an era of the Merry Prankster’s psychedelic bus “Furthur,” Janis Joplin’s Porsche and John Lennon’s Rolls Royce Phantom.
Articulture executive director Elizabeth Greenbaum says it’s a special art form.
“It’s movable public art,” Greenbaum says. “There’s a whole art car community and that’s a special thing.”
One of the originals in the Minnesota art car community is Macalester art and art history professor Ruthann Godollei. She even co-authored a book about it: “Road Show: Art Cars and the Museum of the Streets.”
“Art cars are an ancient practice,” she says. “Every culture that has vehicles has some way to decorate them.”
Minnesota art car history
In the 80s, Godollei was part of the downtown Minneapolis underground alternative art gallery Rifle Sport. It was there that the local art car scene began.
“So we started alternative car shows that would have meetups in parking lots and informal parades,” she says.
Since the beginning, Godollei has been driving her Volvo 240 sedan as an art car. A printmaker, Godellei continuously paints on new stencils in shades of green. A recent iteration includes the phrases “Free Art,” “We can say Bdote,” “Ceasefire” and “Fight Nazis.”
“Some people have bumper stickers but I put my sentiments right on the car,” she says.
She’ll be driving it in this year’s parade, too. Godollei drives it everywhere.
“Oh yes, I’m a daily driver, which means that, you know, I don’t have a parade vehicle,” Godollei says. “I have an art car that I put the art on the street for everyone to see — it’s 24 hours a day. And it’s free, which I really like as a counter to my gallery work, which is fine art. This is a much more accessible art form.”
Minneapolis artist and parade coordinator Jan Elftmann says most Minnesota art car drivers use their cars in daily life. Even the kids camp cars are used as loaners at the Twin Cities auto shop Turbo Tim’s, which provides the cars to the camp to paint on.
“Yeah, Minnesota, we are daily drivers, so we have to make our cars so they are sustainable in all weather,” Elftmann says. That’s counter to other big art car communities like in Houston, Texas. “They have parade cars, so they only bring them out for the parade or they store them. But we use ours every day.”
Elftmann helped make a more formalized annual parade in the mid-’90s through a collaboration with the now-closed Intermedia Arts, an art space that operated for decades in the Lyn-Lake neighborhood of Minneapolis.
Intermedia Arts sent Elftmann to Texas to research art car parades before starting one in Lyn-Lake.
The famous cork truck
“I came back going, ‘I can’t run an art car parade without an art car’,” Elftmann says. “So I told my husband, I said, ‘Dave, what should I do? What should I put on my car? I got to have an art car.’ He goes, ‘Well, what about all those wine corks you’ve been collecting for 13 years in the attic?’”
Elftmann laughs. She’s a found-object artist who collects materials. One of her favorites is the cork made from a specific Mediterranean cork oak tree. She gathered them while waiting tables at an Italian restaurant in St. Paul for 13 years. Once people knew Elftman was looking these for corks, many would drop them off at her house.
“You only find them in Portugal and Spain, a little bit in Morocco, a little bit in France,” Elftmann says. “Those trees live to be 300 years old. There are plantations over there — families, generations, when they plant a tree, they will not see the bark off the tree for the cork that goes in the wine bottle for probably 18 years.”
So she covered her Mazda B2200 with thousands of corks and a cult classic was born: the Cork Truck. The art car has been featured in books and countless articles, even getting a spread in the New York Times. She retired the truck a few years back and made another cork car, also retired. The truck doors now hang above her dining room table.
“One of the doors, I put ‘Jan and Dave’,” she says, running her fingers along the cork. “And then I put a heart on the other side.”
This year Elftmann will drive a friend’s art car in the parade, but she is preparing to make another corker. In her basement are dozens of bins filled with corks.
“I feel like I need to be environmentally correct, so I’m saving up to get an electric car,” Elftmann says. “I’m going to cork it. I don't care what anybody says. I’m gonna cork it.”
This year’s parade
For this year, Elftmann expects about 30 art cars — plus bikes and other transport contraptions.
The majority are from the metro area, with some driving in from greater Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Elftmann ticks off on her fingers the art cars she knows will be there — the pollinator car by a local beekeeper, the “Pink” car with Hello Kitty and Barbie imagery, and one painted with late musicians including the Grateful Dead and Prince. The lipstick car by Patti Paulson will also be circling Lake Harriet.
“That’s a favorite,” Elftmann says. Paulson “kissed the entire car with lipstick and then she has a giant tube of lipstick on the top.”
Elftman says last-minute creations — cars, bikes, or other modes of transport — are welcome to show up at the parade, which has now moved to Lake Harriet. It's a free event entirely organized by artists, she says — there are no sponsors.
“I have learned that every day is a parade when you're in an art car,” she says. “It is so much fun, and people smile and wave. It just makes your heart sing.“
Elftman says the parade could easily continue another 30 years, as long as artists show up.
‘Are you making it glisten?’
Back at Articulture, the camp kids are painting a melting rainbow on the trunk, encouraged by the art instructor Yulia Petrova.
“Are you making it glisten? Are you giving it some highlights?” Petrova asks, pointing to some white brushstrokes.
A few kids nod. “I kind of like it, it makes it look three-dimensional,” Petrova says.
“It makes it look like it’s actually dripping!” one kid says.
The camp artists not only get to paint the car, they get to ride in it during the parade.
“And! And! You get to throw candy,” says camp-goer Malcolm Denny.
Art engines will rev at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Rose Garden on Lake Harriet.
