Lawyers Who ‘Art Car’

For Esteban Martinez, turning his 2004 Toyota Tundra into a mobile homage to all former and current U.S. Supreme Court justices gave him a creative outlet while he was working his way through law school. 

That’s something attorney Jay Goldberg can relate to. When he’s not reviewing contracts as an in-house attorney for Honeywell, he can sometimes be found tinkering with his current art car: a purple 1989 Dodge Ram Charger with a mirrored mosaic dragon glued to the side. 

It’s called the Dragon Wagon, of course. 

And the same theme applies to Katie Stahl, who by day helps her clients solve their copyright, trademark and defamation issues at Mudd Law. At night she spends time covering her 2002 Ford Explorer with three-by-three inch squares of origami paper. 

“I think attorneys, at their core, are creative but our creativity is always funneled toward our business and career and toward whatever the clients’ needs are,” Stahl said. “This is something that’s for me, and my friends and for the community.”

“As attorneys we have negative things that we deal with every day, and this is 100 percent positive.” 

This Saturday, upwards of 300,000 people will line the sides of Allen Parkway just west of downtown Houston to take in that positivity at what is called the world’s largest art car parade. The 37th annual event will feature about 280 entries. 

There are new entrants and crowd favorites that appear year after year — the Sashimi Tabernacle Choir, an older model Volvo covered with a few hundred animatronic bass and lobsters, singing in unison; and the Santa car, topped with a massive Santa hat and adorned with dozens of glued-on Santa figurines. 

Those are the ones that are somewhat easy to describe.

But there are many cars that require photographs to explain, like the Honda hatchback called Map of Space and Time, or the Toyota Corolla with a license plate that says WHAT THA and features various colored plastic lighters and legs of Barbie dolls glued around the wheel wells with a mushroom forest scene in its back window. 

On Thursday during a lead-up event called the Main Street Drag, police motorcycles escort dozens of cars crisscrossing the city on seven different routes to bring art cars to hospitals, schools and nursing home residents who otherwise wouldn’t see them. Goldberg was there, donning a stuffed dragon’s head in place of a baseball cap embroidered with the phrase Drive it Like you Stole it.  

It was time to take the Dragon Wagon on tour. 

At Brazos Towers retirement community, the first stop, a resident asked Goldberg how he got the dragon mosaic to stick to the side of his car. She has some crushed glass, she explained, that she’d like to turn into 3-D angels to stick on her car in certain spots where the paint has worn. 

“You’ve inspired me,” she said. 

At stops two and three, Parker Elementary and Red Elementary, respectively, it was a bit of déjà vu.

Squealing and shrieking children sprinted across the playground and shoved their faces against the fence, jockeying for the best view of the art cars as they pulled into the circle drive in front of the school. 

Then hundreds of children were calmly walked around the parked cars, guided by patient teachers who repeatedly reminded them to look with their eyes, not their hands. 

But there was no one to keep Goldberg in line. 

Click Here for a slideshow of entries in the 2024 Art Car Parade

Armed with the dragon hat, he partially hid himself in front of the Wagon, only his head perched on top of the mobile mosaic. 

“RAAAAR!” he yelled at unsuspecting children as they got close. 

Some responded in kind. Some took a step back, or away, from the Dragon Wagon. Others seemed too cool to care. 

“I try not to jump at the little ones,” Goldberg said later. “But if they’re, like, second grade, they’re fair game.” 

The visit also offered an educational opportunity for the students. One artist, standing next to a Volkswagen Beetle covered with 7,000 plastic lids from 40-ounce bottles of Steele Reserve, posed a math question.

“How many beers would you have to drink each day in a year to cover the car?” 

Attempts to answer devolved after one student shamed another for thinking there were 325 days in a year. 

Stahl’s Blessing Garden 

A native Houstonian, Stahl said she was probably in high school the first time she heard about the Art Car Parade. 

But she didn’t participate until around 1999, when she was in law school and a friend made an aircraft carrier art car and invited Stahl and others to join, dressed as Navy sailors. 

It was 2016 by the time she was ready to enter the parade with her own car. As a self-described lover of crafting and “all things Japanese,” covering her Ford Explorer with origami paper just made sense, she said. 

She named her art car Blessing Garden, which was a name she picked up from her high school Japanese teacher. The Japanese characters for “blessing” and the characters for “garden” make the sounds “Kay-ee-tay-ee,” similar to Katie.  

“It’s fun and meditative,” she said of the 40-plus hours it takes to cover, and recover, the car with origami paper. 

Participating in the Art Car Parade also gives Stahl a community of like-minded friends, who enjoy talking shop.

“What kind of glue are you using?”

“How are you wiring the lights?”

Blessing Garden has been on road trips, too. It’s seen art car parades in Colorado and appeared in Galveston’s mardi gras parade. 

“I forget that I’m driving the art car and people will honk and wave and stare at me,” she said of the trips outside Houston. “It’s always positive. Nobody’s ever had a negative reaction to the car.” 

Her hobby has also been a topic of discussion at work. It’s served as an ice breaker in the downtime before a deposition, and at conferences.

But, do the lawyers she talks to about art cars get it?

“You don’t really have to explain it, honestly,” she said. “You just show them the pictures and they’re like ‘Oh, I get it.’”

“As a young lawyer, you want to fit in and wear the black suit, and think you have to be a certain way to be a lawyer,” the 47-year old said. “And over the years, I thought, I’m not going to be like that. And this is part of it.” 

With This Truck, I Thee Wed

Goldberg wasn’t the artist behind the Dragon Wagon. He bought it years ago off of Art Car legend Rebecca Bass, a retired Houston Independent School District art teacher who created and founded the district’s Art Car Class. 

But his history with the community goes back to 1996, when he asked his then-girlfriend (now, wife) to attend the parade. 

“She said, ‘OK, but what’s an art car parade?’” he recalled. “250 cars later, she said we’ve got to do this next year.” 

He acted on her decision the very next day at a swap meet, where he bought a 1964 Ford pickup truck for $200. 

Ideas on what to do with the pickup “were not really forthcoming,” so it sat until 1999 when Goldberg and his fiancé decided to incorporate it into their upcoming wedding reception. 

“The easiest way to make an art car is to have someone else do it for you,” he said. 

So rather than signing a guest book, those who attended the Goldberg nuptials were encouraged to leave their mark on the pickup with a variety of supplies, including glue, paint, markers, glitter and stuffed animals. 

That project, called With This Truck, I Thee Wed, made its Art Car Parade debut in 2000, pulling a red wagon carrying Goldberg’s wife in her wedding gown. 

A few days later, he ended up being gifted an art car from another member of the community, an art teacher whose school had no room for the Frogmobile she helped create and who was looking to unload the vehicle so she could do another art car project. 

Goldberg’s motorized popcorn machine and “Power Nap”

The Ford pickup got a redesign in 2001, when Goldberg repurposed a 15-foot long Jabba the Hutt replica (that was so large two people could fit inside and move the creature’s mouth and tongue) and secured it to the top of the truck. 

Jabba the Truck was born. 

He didn’t stop there. His creations have included a motorized crib called Power Nap that his then-5-year-old son drove in the parade, and a motorized popcorn machine that his son paraded five years later. 

And Justice for All 

A lifelong Houston resident, Martinez first participated in the Art Car Parade in 2002. 

But he didn’t have his own entry. 

And he didn’t really know what he was getting into. 

He and a group of friends riffed on the norteño band Los Tigres Del Norte, dressed as members of The Ramones, and jammed on a trailer pulled by a friend’s art car as Los Ramones Del Norte. 

“I got hooked on it after,” he said. “It was really the atmosphere — all these eccentric people showing their creativity.” 

Back in those days, there were cars that featured live fire.

“But they clamped down on that.”

He estimates he’s made about 16 art cars over the years. There was the tribute to soldiers who died in the war in Iraq, featuring a soldier painted on the car for every soldier who had died. 

“I remember the day of the parade I had to add 15 soldiers because there was a big bombing,” he said. 

He made an invisible plane out of Plexiglas, shaped like a stealth bomber, that he affixed to a tricycle which his daughter pedaled in the parade as a tribute to Wonder Woman. 

His daughter was about 10 then, and the plane weighed three times as much as she did. 

He’s made art motorcycles, too, featuring airbrushed skulls, and a PT Cruiser that he airbrushed skulls onto as well, aptly named Skully. Skully pulled a trailer with a coffin, which was also adorned with skulls. 

There’s a byproduct to creating art cars: learning new skills. 

Martinez now knows how to weld, thanks to a 12-foot-long stretch limousine go-kart he created. And he knows how to work with Plexiglas without cracking it, thanks to the invisible plane. He’s also handy with chicken wire, foam and Bondo from bringing other art car ideas to life. 

That go-kart would later evolve into “Skeebies,” a made-up word his daughter blurted out after seeing it crowned with a huge purple, dinosaur-like head with a mohawk.

His Toyota Tundra, now featuring portraits of Supreme Court justices, is called “And Justice for All” — not in honor of the court, but of Metallica.

In a previous life, it was known as “I See Dead People” adorned by 100 of his hand-painted images of dead artists, movie stars and musicians.

His cars have made road trips to art car parades and shows in Oklahoma and Seattle. Unlike Stahl, Martinez cannot say that reactions to his art cars have been completely positive. 

There was the time a few years back he took Skully, the PT Cruiser, on the Main Street Drag and a Catholic charity was one of the stops on his route. 

“When the priest saw my car, he crossed himself,” he said. “He was tripping out. It was hilarious.” 

Then there was the time he took Skully on a roadtrip to Dallas. 

“There was a guy, he blocked traffic to pull up next to me and said, ‘Hey! Are you a Satanist?!’ I said, ‘No, man, it’s an art car. It’s just art.’”

“People will interpret it the way they want,” Martinez said. “But it’s just art.” 

But like Stahl, he does find the truck is a good ice breaker. It should be noted that And Justice for All is what the Art Car community refers to as a “daily driver” — a car that is the main mode of transportation for the artist who created it. 

He said it prompts conversations with coworkers and clients, as well as potential employers (prior to his landing a job focusing on estate planning and probate work at Dossey & Jones). 

“You show up at a job interview and some people are like ‘What the hell is that that pulled up in my parking lot?’” he said, laughing. 

That next April, Guter saw Martinez’ truck in the parade — which featured a full-color photo of the nine justices then on the court covering the entirety of the tailgate — and snapped a picture that he emailed to the justice. 

“She said she was honored and thought it was an excellent way to celebrate the court and its important role in our democracy,” Guter told The Lawbook, including in the email the exact photo he sent Justice Ginsburg. 

Guter, of course, relayed that praise to Martinez. 

“Ginsburg loved the truck,” he said. “That was awesome. I really liked Ginsburg a lot to begin with, and to get that kind of response from her, it was just awesome.”