Artist paints car that fuses Chicano culture with Indigenous pottery craft

In Santa Fe, Indian Market will begin on Saturday. An artist from Laguna and Santo Domingo Pueblos is showcasing his newest project that fuses Pueblo pottery designs with Chicano lowrider culture on a

LITTLEBIRD: So in 2024 I was very fortunate to sell a painting to Jeremiah Bitsui and I told him, with the money that came from that sale, that I was going to buy a 1973 Dodge Dart Sedan. So I've been into classic cars for a while now, and so getting into that naturally being a painter, wanted to try my hand at painting one because that's a whole new craft to learn and a whole new set of skills to acquire, and it has been a really big learning process

KUNM: What was your inspiration for the idea behind I’m going tackle this, I’m going to paint a car?

LITTLEBIRD: Definitely inspired by my own identity, as well as just the New Mexico culture here. I'd like to think of it as a culmination of all the cultures that are here, and also it being not your typical car that gets chosen to be a painted car, like in a lowrider vein. So even researching the cars I wanted to use was kind of very important. The Dodge Dart, back in its day, was like, kind of like the car of the people, you know, even before we painted it, we get a lot of people come up to us and say, “Oh, this was the first car I ever bought”

One last thing I'd like to say is the influences on it are very important to me. It started, actually, with Keith Haring's art cars that he painted back in the 80s. Even the body shape and the cars that I saw he painted back in the 80s, and he painted motorcycles as well, are more like a proletariat kind of car. And then obviously Rose B. Simpson’s El Camino and Mike Giant's Pontiac Tempest. And so those three influences, I'd like to definitely, you can see in the inspiration of it, but I wanted to stand out and have its own mark on it.

KUNM: So have you driven it around? Have you received compliments? Have you received anyone willing to buy it?

LITTLEBIRD: Yeah, it was kind of funny. The day before it got its first coat of paint, someone left a note on the window that they wanted to buy it, and it wasn't even painted yet. My goal with it was really just to have people, like, put a smile on people's face when they see it driving around, have it be a rolling piece of pottery. It just brings a lot of joy to my heart that it can be like a conversation piece within the community, and it can bridge the gap between many different cultures.

KUNM: That's amazing. And do you plan on keeping it to yourself?

LITTLEBIRD: Well we will have it for sale, that is kind of an announcement. My idea, from the beginning, when I first bought the car, was like, I'm gonna paint this car, sell it to fund other projects. And it's kind of just my philosophy with a lot of my art, is this more entrepreneurial kind of spirit. We're like, okay, invest in something, see if anyone is excited about it, and then use that money to invest in other projects that we can help other people get involved with things as well. But as of now, it's got a couple of events that it’s going to be a part of: the first one being Indian Market, in front of the Loretto chapel next to La Fonda, and then later this next month at the State Fair at the Indian village. And then it'll also be at the Tucson Museum of Art as part of their show on Indigenous transportation, which it'll be along many other really cool painted cars.

KUNM: So what do you hope your viewers get out of this when they come and see the car?

LITTLEBIRD: I hope people, because it'll be parked the majority of the time, but it's really exciting to see it and surprise you. It also adds to the cruising culture that we have here in New Mexico, something different. It's also a conversation piece for the decorative nature of Indigenous arts and crafts and that maybe things aren't always just purely decorative. Maybe they have a more deeper meaning to them. You know, I don't necessarily agree with some how a lot of Indigenous art is seen purely as decorative. You know, most times it means something. It comes from somewhere. These designs are passed down for generations. And looking through a lot of them, you know, I learned a lot about just the respect to the craft. Like a line might just be not just a line, you might mean something more than that. Like, on the driver's side, it has a big rain cloud there. And I always have looked at it like, the rain clouds as being a lot of blessing, you know. So, yeah there's a lot in it. It's also kind of funny, because the windshield wipers don't work on it. So if it rains, that's one little thing that I gotta fix. It's like, it's a pretty easy fix. It's a little motor behind the thing.

KUNM: Well it did rain in Santa Fe last weekend, so yeah, that might be a problem.

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Artist paints car that fuses Chicano culture with Indigenous pottery craft