lowrider

She’s gathered up ephemera — magazines, snapshots, lowrider bicycle parts, bandannas, street signs, keychains, newspapers, fuzzy dice to hang from a car’s rearview mirror, feathers, fake flowers and more — and she’s put them to one of two primary uses: Some form component parts of assemblage sculptures, while others are displayed in cases, like rare anthropological artifacts, or else tacked onto poster boards, like treasures from a teenager’s bedroom.

More disarming is the car culture room, where high art and lowrider productively collide.

An eccentric fainting couch, the horizontal hole is lavishly embellished with plush pink tufted upholstery, like the tuck-and-roll interior of a sexy 1964 Chevy Impala, the ultimate “Lowrider” in the movie of the same name.

Since then, symbols of Chicano identity, such as oversized streetwear, elaborate tattoos and lowrider cars, have permeated mainstream culture.

Within conservative Asian cultures, the adventurous clothing and accessories of Chicano culture are a large part of the appeal, said Ignacio Lopez Calvo, a professor at UC Merced who has studied the spread of lowrider culture in Japan.