Lowriders the 'Faberge eggs of the car culture'

updated 7:57 p.m. ET April 24, 2008

LOS ANGELES - When he started tinkering with that old Chevy nearly 40 years ago, Jesse Valadez didn't have any idea he was creating a museum piece in his garage. He just wanted a cool ride that would attract girls.

But things changed between those nights when Valadez was getting stopped by cops suspicious of any long-haired kid in a car that rode inches off the ground and the days when they began pulling the balding, middle-aged man over to admiringly gaze at his automobile.

Lowriding is high art these days and Valadez, a gracious, soft-spoken man of 61 who makes his living reupholstering cars, is one of its masters.

"I had no idea," he says, standing on a corner of East Los Angeles' Whittier Boulevard where some say lowriding was born. "I did say when I was building it, 'This car that I'm working on, people are going to hear about this car someday,'" he recalls with a chuckle. "But it never dawned on me that it was going to become famous."

Known in lowriding circles the world over as the Gypsy Rose for the intricately detailed 150 red roses covering its body, Valadez's 1964 Chevrolet Impala, with its velvet seats and its chandeliers, is one of the centerpieces of the Petersen Automotive Museum's ongoing "La Vida Lowriding" exhibition.

Surrounding it are some two dozen other tricked-out vehicles, including a pickup truck owned by musician Ry Cooder that holds an elaborate mural depicting the history of Chavez Ravine, the Los Angeles barrio shut down by authorities in the 1950s to make way for Dodger Stadium. Another is Dressed to Kill, a 1971 Buick Riviera with its eerie scenes of a graveyard at sundown. Its owner is Lowrider Magazine Editor Joe Ray.

"We call these the Faberge eggs of the car culture," says Dick Messer, the museum's executive director, as he strolls pass the rows of exhibits, pausing to admire each one. "They are so incredibly well executed when it comes to the paint jobs and inlays and gold leaf and silver leaf. There's an ice cream truck in the lobby, it took the guy 12 years to build."

That would be the work of Mr. Cartoon, another legendary and somewhat mysterious figure who prefers to go by no other name. His day job is designing clothes and shoes, including several lines of the latter for Nike.

Since 1995, however, much of his spare time has been given over to a dilapidated 1963 truck he recovered from a South Los Angeles yard, overhauled, lowered and turned into an airbrushed work of art. Every inch is now covered in tangerine, purple, yellow and other cartoonish colors that depict clowns, balloons, ice cream sundaes and Los Angeles street scenes.

Cartoon takes the truck to schools to show how it helped a kid from the street turn his life around and become a "homeboy homeowner." He's delighted to see it in the exhibit, which runs until June 8.

"Lowriding has always been the most lowbrow form of car culture," he says. "But out of it comes these beautiful works of art."

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