Lowrider culture takes center stage at de Young Museum

Lowrider culture pulled a major San Francisco museum into a long-running Bay Area tradition, with community members gathering at the de Young Museum to celebrate a movement built on family, craftsmanship and neighborhood identity. The scene around Rose B. Simpson’s exhibition, LEXICON, was not just about polished cars inside a gallery. It was about a public institution in Golden Gate Park treating a culture once dismissed as fringe as part of the city’s cultural canon.

The exhibition, on view at 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive through February 2027, is described as the first solo exhibition of a contemporary Native American artist at the de Young. Inside, two customized vehicles helped make Simpson’s ideas legible to museum visitors: a 1985 Chevrolet El Camino titled Maria and a 1964 Buick Riviera, also identified in related coverage as Bosque. The cars sat alongside Simpson’s broader work, which connects Pueblo pottery traditions and American car culture.

That pairing gave the lowrider gathering a larger meaning for San Francisco. For many of the people drawn to the museum, lowriding has never been only about appearance or mechanics. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History says the practice has an 80-year history in Mexican American communities and has long been tied to creativity, family and tradition. At the de Young, that history was being framed not as a side note, but as a cultural form worthy of the same institutional attention given to painting, sculpture and design.

California’s legal shift only sharpened that point. Assembly Bill 436 took effect Jan. 1, 2024, and barred cities and counties from banning lowrider cruising, ending a restriction that had shaped how the culture moved through public space. The de Young’s programming around LEXICON extended that recognition further, with a Lowrider Culture Celebration on June 6 that featured a lowrider exhibit on the museum lawn, film screenings, a panel curated by Vero Majano on the Doñas of the Lowrider Community, music by DJ Brown Angel and family art-making activities with Cecilia Perez.

The exhibition’s framing also reflected the work of museum staff trying to place the cars in a richer historical context. Hillary C. Olcott, curator of Arts of the Americas, curated LEXICON, while Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco director of interpretation Abram Jackson worked on the exhibition didactics and related programming. Simpson, who grew up and lives on Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico near Española, has made the relationship between clay and cars central to her practice. At the de Young, that connection became a larger civic statement: lowrider culture belongs in the center of the city’s story, not at its edge.