SAN FRANCISCO — For the trio of artists featured in Sitting on Chrome, customization is a creation story. Chrome dipped, velvet upholstered, and bass heavy, the exhibition is a celebration of lowrider aesthetics and the rich material culture cultivated through the craft tradition of car customization. In a series of individual and collaborative works on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Los Angeles-based artists and friends Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales examine lowrider cruising and its role in shaping Chicanx identities and relationships with public space.
Curated by Jovanna Venegas, Tomoko Kanamitsu, and Maria Castro, the show transforms the museum’s second floor gallery into a lowrider car. Visitors are first greeted with a collaborative mural meant to evoke a lowrider exterior. Emphasizing that this is, indeed, a family affair, the mural features vignettes of each artist’s personal practices, made cohesive with lace stenciling and metallic details — courtesy of San Francisco sign painter Lauren D’Amato. Inside, D’Amato’s pinstripe motifs and looping, airbrushed roses unspool across exhibition walls alongside plush, pin-tucked velvet walls, further immersing viewers into the world of the lowrider.
The origins of the lowrider can be traced to the 1940s, when Mexican American teenagers in LA began modifying their cars — altering springs and loading up trunks with sandbags — to go “low and slow.” Designed for deceleration, lowrider culture emerged in opposition to the high-octane hot rods that dominated Southern California car culture at the time. Lowriding allowed drivers to see and be seen, and the cars’ requisite low-slung bodies soon gave way to self-expressive gestures that expanded the lowriders’ aesthetic vernacular to include the candy paint jobs, intricate airbrushed detailing, and chrome finishes to which the exhibition pays tribute.
With Sitting on Chrome, the artists are able to successfully translate the rules of the road to the confines of an art institution in part because of a dedication to context. In the first room, metal vitrines display zines and ephemera drawn from Ayala’s and Rosales’s personal archives documenting the Chicano communities that gave rise to lowrider culture. Thumbing through copies of zines like San Francisco-based Mi Vida Loca (La Raza), one might find snippets about lowrider fashion alongside testimonies from Bay Area high school students organizing against racist school administrators. On the other side of the room, a series of Rosales’s atmospheric photographs, framed in etched chrome, offer portraits of spaces, such as the 6th Street viaduct in downtown LA, that serve as vital thoroughfares central to the lowrider community.
Across the show, homage takes on different textures in each of the artist’s independent works. Ayala’s “Gypsy Rose” (2017) transposes the glossy pink exterior of perhaps the most iconic lowrider, Jesse Valdez’s Chevy Impala of the same name, onto a barbecue grill, outfitted with side-view mirrors and chrome-coated charcoal briquettes. Meanwhile, in “Drifting on a Memory (Dedication to Gypsy Rose)” (2023), Rosales subtracts a sliver from the gallery walls, installing a magenta and royal purple-upholstered rear deck accented with a shimmering disco ball.
Sitting on Chrome reminds us that to be unhurried and unbothered can be an act of resistance. A warped traffic sign in the first room reads “No Cruising,” and goes on to clarify that “Two Times Past Same Point Within Six Hours Is Cruising.” Taken by Rosales from East LA’s iconic cruising strip, Whittier Boulevard, the sign locates the exhibition’s material meditations in a historical context of racialized policing against lowriders and Chicanos on the road. It was in response to laws targeting lowriders, passed in California in 1958, that drivers began installing hydraulics into their cars, allowing them to lower and lift suspensions with the flip of the switch. This lent lowriders a mastery of gravity that brought forth the choreographed bobs, swoops, and plummets that have become synonymous with lowriding.
There is, however, a braggadocio to the bounce. Tied up in the showmanship and art of cruising is a culture that is inextricable from the performance of hyper-masculinity. In a portion of the show titled More Bounce, the artists problematize masculinity’s role within the lowrider tradition by excavating the relationship between machine and body. Drawing inspiration from the practice of vehicular modification, the artists use the concept of hybridity as a lens through which to reimagine lowriding as a site for queer worldbuilding. In esparza’s “Corpo RafLA: Terra Cruiser”(2022), the artist has transformed a coin-operated mechanical ride into a cyborgian sculpture modeled after a lowrider bike. Along with signature motifs like twining handlebars and glittering metallic paint, the bike is outfitted with chrome vestibules for the artist to place his arms and legs in. Activated through performance by esparza and his friends, the piece allows him to literally become a lowrider. The work is meant to evoke the double meaning of cruising; it’s helmed with a gold-plated disc golf basket, a reference to gay cruising grounds in LA’s Elysian Park that have been eroded by the expansion of a nearby disc golf course, as esparza explains in the exhibition’s accompanying documentary.
The low thrum of fuzzed bass reverberates throughout the show, and strains of standards like Aly-Us’s house anthem “Follow Me” beckon visitors into a back room of the gallery space. Here, the artists have replicated the sonic landscape of lowriding, constructing a hexagonal sound installation, “Gravitron” (2023), out of car speakers and neon lighting. In a corner of the room, Rosales’s similarly lit sculptural portal, “low & slow” (2023), revolves in perpetual motion. A snapshot of a woman is placed at the center of a spinning wheel, peering back to meet the viewer’s gaze. The piece is enclosed by a sheet of two-way glass, reframing the surveillant nature of the material, most commonly found in settings like liquor stores and banks, as a tool for looking.
Sitting on Chrome is a triumph in accumulation. Through a dense layering of ornamentation, sound, and motion, the artists provide not only a chronicle of lowrider history but also a glimpse into its future. Experiments with mediums like adobe, in the case of esparza’s life-sized adobe paintings, or chrome, as in Rosales’s “tu memoria” (2023), in which she’s dipped the gate of her childhood home into chrome, transforming it into a shrine, preserve material knowledge for future generations. Although lowriding has been legally reinstated and even celebrated, recent measures passed by the California state government banning the use of hex chrome may alter the ways of making that have become inseparable from lowriding culture itself. In light of these developments, these artists’ reinterpretations take on new meaning, as the future of lowriding remains in flux.
Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales continues at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (151 Third Street, San Francisco, California) through February 19. The exhibition was curated by Jovanna Venegas, Tomoko Kanamitsu, and Maria Castro.
