We can’t talk about the history of the Rat Rod movement without talking about the touring exhibit that made it possible.
In 1993, Craig Stecyk –– the writer and photographer who basically introduced the world to the Venice Beach Dog Town and Z-Boys with his Skateboarder magazine articles in the Seventies –– curated an exhibit at the Laguna Art Museum entitled “Kustom Kulture: Von Dutch, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Robert Williams & Others.”
The exhibit, for the first time, brought the work of the original Low Brow artists to light in a legitimate gallery setting. Looking back from the end of the first decade of the new millenium, it seems crazy to think that pinstripers and Rat Fink and custom paint guys and poster artists didn’t get gallery play. But in the early Nineties, Ed Roth and Von Dutch and other artists of car culture had been virtually forgotten. Hell, ‘car culture’ wasn’t even a common term yet. Von Franco, long-time Low Brow artist/hotrodder/friend, remembers seeing Ed Roth selling t-shirts out of the back of his mini-truck at car shows in the Eighties. A far cry from his coronation since his passing in 2001.