Jesse Littlebird’s Petrolglyph moves in place, expanding horizons on the future of New Mexican lowriding and American car culture through Indigenous art.
Cruising low and slow, hydraulics bear the bumps in the road right into the supershow of tomorrow.
The mirror-like finish of chrome is interdimensional, transtemporal. Its sheen is long associated with the future and the past, or the future-of-the-past. While we are taught that past and future are in opposition, Pueblo art explores this duality as unified and overlapping. The mirrored designs of Pueblo pottery use compound reflections to communicate the inextricable connections between the ethereal world and this world.
Lacquer: a gloss made of tree resin, used to shine Christian icons and lowriders. Oil: the machine’s life-giving substance made of bones; used for waterproofing and lubrication for axles on wagons;1 black hair slicked-back, streamlined like a car hood; also: the primordial substance of the American West.
A brief history of the lowrider
In 1965, Tom Wolfe published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, a firsthand glimpse into the hotrodder subculture of Los Angeles youths, written with an art-historical edge. Wolfe’s titular essay was the first to consider custom cars as a serious cultural form of their own, as a fusion of Baroque ornamentation with American industrialism.
In the 1980s, photographers explored the barrios of California and New Mexico to capture the “bad boy” lowriders. This documentary practice was invaluable to the historicization of lowriding, but at times voyeuristic.2 At the time, lowriding was outlawed across California and New Mexico.
The DIY sensibility of the 1990s brought forth youth publications such as California’s cult zine Teen Angels (1981-2006), which provided a necessary antidote to the criminalization of the subculture through positive self-representation and artistic expression. By the 2010s, Southwest art institutions experienced a lowrider zeitgeist, with car-oriented exhibitions popping up in car-oriented cities everywhere.
For some Chicano/a youth, custom cars were the launchpad into the revolving door that trapped young Brown men in a cycle of incarceration. Today, the City of Albuquerque celebrates New Mexican lowriders as part of their cultural heritage. Yet, only seven years ago, lowriding was outlawed as “irresponsible driving behavior.” After the “Cruising Task Force” initiative led by city councilor Klarissa Peña, lowriding could return to the streets so long as it remained within the boundaries of 1st and 12th Streets on Central Avenue on Sunday evenings.3 Otherwise, car club meetings and outings would need approval by the Albuquerque Police Department.
In May 2021, the APD unveiled its very own custom lowrider, complete with bouncing hydraulics. The lowrider was officially subsumed into the civic imagination.
Jesse Littlebird’s Petrolglyph cruising the here-and-now
In August 2024, Albuquerque-based artist Jesse Littlebird (Laguna/Kewa) debuted his “rolling pottery piece” Petrolglyph on a cruise through the streets of Albuquerque. Petrolglyph asserts contemporary Indigeneity into Nuevomexicano cruising culture, drawing references to Rose B. Simpson’s custom 1985 El Camino Maria (2014), and tattoo artist Mike Giant’s custom 1965 Pontiac Tempest Colorblind (2022). It’s not a true lowrider yet—Littlebird is still working on the suspension.
Petrolglyph’s title is a portmanteau of “petroglyph,” a rock carving form commonly found in Ancestral Pueblo sites, and “petroleum.” The vehicle of choice—a modest 1973 Dodge Dart sedan—is atypical for lowriders, but intentional: the Dart is a local volkswagen, a car of the people.4 Littlebird notes that the Dart was a model for old-school police fleets, common for rez cop cars.
Petrolglyph functions as a site of negotiation for Albuquerque’s tricultural imaginary, reflecting the city back to itself in its shiny finish. Petrolglyph embraces the complicated Indigenous present, the here-and-now, rolling through an urban borderland founded on a Spanish land grant.5 Nathaniel Paolinelli’s portrait of Petrolglyph captures it moving in place in front of Albuquerque’s historic KiMo Theatre, a “Pueblo Deco picture palace” built in 1927 by Italian settler Oreste Bachechi.6 Petrolglyph’s presence in front of the KiMo illuminates the entanglement of highways, cinema, art, and architecture in the Southwest. The rumbling hum of the Dart is felt, pulsing directly through each thick layer of colonialism.
Littlebird has just opened an art gallery on Central Avenue and 6th Street, Kukani Gallery, across from a lot recently designated by the City for staging 150 lowriders during the Sunday cruise. Petrolglyph will be on view there, facing dozens of polychrome lowriders lined like a Mondrian grid.
