Houston might be reaching the end of a keeping-it-weird era as the Art Car Museum is set to close on April 28th, according to a statement on the organization’s website. Founded in 1998 by artist and curator Ann O’Connor Williams Harithas and the influential museum director, curator and scholar James Harithas, the private institution garnered national and international attention over the years with its dedication to that most unique of folk art movements and mediums, the art car.
While Art Car Museum representatives have not yet issued a statement on what facilitated the museum’s closing, the deaths of Ann Harithas in 2021 and James Harithas in 2023 have been a deep loss to the Houston art community. The New York Times obituary for James Harithas notes he was the curator who gave artists such as Yoko Ono and Julian Schnabel their first solo shows, and describes how the marriage of James and Ann in 1978 would help Houston takes its prominent place in the international art world.
The Art Car Museum is set to close its doors April 28, 2024.
“The couple spent the following decades in Houston working to transform that brawny oil town into an art hub,” states the Times.
As the organizer of the pivotal Lawndale Art Center show Collision in 1984, Ann Harithas was one of the first curators to detour art cars off the road and into museums. This was the same year that the Orange Show Gala first auctioned off a car that Houston artist Jackie Harris transformed into an artwork on wheels and two years before a proto-art car parade first convoyed as a part of a music festival and celebration of the sculpture garden opening at the Museum of Fine Arts.
Since its founding, the Art Car Museum has presented a diversity of exhibitions focused not just on art cars, but on artists and works that hold a similar spirit of freedom and quirky individuality. The museum has particularly championed up and coming contemporary and Texas-based artist.
Perhaps appropriate with the news of the museum’s closing, the current exhibition on view is The Creative Era of Ann Harithas. The exhibition stands as both a retrospective of Harithas's body of work as an artist and a tribute to the era of creativity ignited by Harithas. Featuring pieces from her extensive body of collage works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the exhibition also showcases her own art car creations and those she commissioned and collected.
With the announcement of the closure, the museum has also given some hints for the future.
“Discussions are in progress with local and regional arts organizations to continue and evolve the Art Car Museum’s presence, legacy, and mission in the future. The details of those discussions and plans will be shared further as and when they take shape,” the museum informs on its website.
While the museum dedicated to the art car might close or, with the help of those local and regional arts organizations, might perhaps evolve into something new, Houston’s love of the art car remains steadfast. In his Art Car Manifesto, James Harithas called art cars “revolutionary,” and this art revolution shows no signs of ending soon. The annual Orange Show’s Art Car Parade grows every year, celebrating its 37th year April 11-14. And over the decades, similar parades have cropped up around the world, though none can compete with Houston’s.
So as we take one last free spin around the Art Car Museum (Wednesday-Sunday by appointment), we muse upon the words of Harithas’s manifesto that calls us to drive, create, and live with a bit of that art car spirit.
“Art cars are a grass roots movement. Change your vehicle, improve it, personalize it, and make your own statement with it so that you can once again become one with it. Art cars are an expression of your freedom and above all, of the God-given American right to be yourself and flaunt it on the highways and byways of America.”
