Creative District Car Art Project

This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Seven years ago the town of Trinidad in southern Colorado decided to create a festival representing the "art of the car". The founder, Rodney Wood, defined the festival and its highlight parade with the slogan "if you can't drive it, it's a float".  Since then, Trinidad’s ArtoCade parade has become one of the largest in the country, second only to Houston in number of participants, with over 100 in the 2018 parade.

Trinidad and Longmont are both part of the Creative Districts program. Members are approved and administered by Colorado Creative Industries (CCI), which in turn is part of the Colorado Office of Economic Development.  The purpose of each of the Districts is to create hubs and clusters of economic activity and promote a community’s unique identity through the arts.  Ultimately, Creative Districts enhance their areas as appealing places to live, conduct business and attract visitors.   There are 23 certified Creative Districts in Colorado.

Trinidad’s Rodney Wood came up with the idea for bringing all the districts together in a Car Art project and named it a CAR-laboration. The districts would collaborate to create a car to participate in the 2019 ArtoCade and also travel the state to tour each of the Districts. 

Vito Montone, director of the Longmont Creative District, asked volunteer Randall Green to produce Longmont’s participation. Green, who is also on the Board of Longmont’s Art in Public Places Commission, contacted artists and submitted their work to the District. With her specialty being mosaics in both 2- and 3-D, Suzan Hatch was selected for the project.

Each of the Creative Districts’ artists would work on the car together in Salida, creating technical issues that needed to be addressed ahead of time.   How to work vertically on a car door and how to figure out what best adhesives to use and other challenges.  

A1 Auto Salvage kindly provided a car fender so Suzan and Randall could test mounting the mosaic pieces before they went to the event.  None of the Creative Districts’ artists was given the exact dimensions of their space on the car but Longmont knew that they would have a passenger door handle to contend with.   This meant that the piece needed to be flexible with individual modular sections.  Hatch created the final design and hand placed most of the tiles before the event.

Randall and Suzan traveled together to Salida for the mounting, which took place during the May Convening of the Creative Districts. They then worked together to mount the sections on the car with silicon, rubber matting, and screws. The artists were allowed a three hour time frame to work on the car and this meant that there could be 95 people working on the car all at once.  So a busy and hectic time for all the artists and collaborators. 

Green took photos when he could but needed to work fast with Hatch to get the work done.

So what now for the car?  It will leave Salida, and eventually end up in Trinidad, where it will take part in the ArtoCade on Saturday, 14^th September. That will be the highlight of Trinidad’s weekend long Art Car Festival. The schedule for the Creative Districts’ tour has not been finalized yet, but will surely be featured in Longmont’s summer of art.

Hatch is participating in the Prospect Artists Tour on 7^th and 8^th June and her work will also be on view at the Firehouse Gallery on 4th Street during the Second Friday night on 14^th June.  She also has upcoming shows in Nederland in August and again in Longmont in September.  View her website at www.suzanhatchart.com for examples of her (non-car) mosaic work.