Art Car Museum
Houston’s Art Car Museum, a beloved tribute to both local and national car artists, is slated to close after 25 years in business.
Recently announced on the museum’s website, officials said the famous museum on Heights Boulevard will be opened to the public until April 28, and plans to commemorate its legacy are currently up in the air.
“Discussions are in progress with local and regional arts organizations to continue and evolve the Art Car Museum’s presence, legacy and the mission in the future,” according to a statement on the museum’s website. “The details of those discussions and plans will be shared further as and when they take shape.”
The announcement of the Art Car Museum’s closure came after the deaths of co-founders Ann O’Connor Williams Harithas in 2021 and her husband James Harithas in 2023. Both fiercely-devoted founders were known as legends in Houston’s contemporary art scene, and their memories were carried out through the renowned “Garage Mahal” Art Car Museum.
The museum is slated to close just two weeks after Houston’s Art Car Parade from April 11- 14.
The Art Car Museum became a national relic soon after it opened in 1998, quickly drawing crowds from around the world.
Art Car Museum
An art car is a motor-driven vehicle which a car artist alters to suit their personal aesthetics. The artist will add or remove materials from a vehicle to create the mobile masterpiece.
“The result is a vehicle which conveys new meaning through design, mechanical or structural changes, renovation, and/or the addition of new images, symbols or collage elements,” according to the museum’s Art Car Manifesto.
The museum was known to shake up what’s so commonly recognized as the mundane nature of mass-produced manufactured vehicles, according to the museum.
“The art car is revolutionary in the sense that it reclaims the vehicle for the individual and proclaims an independence and diversity which is in sharp contract to the increasingly conventional and impersonal automobiles and trucks which are currently being produced,” James Harithas wrote in the manifesto .