Shepard Fairey’s latest art car is built around a deliberately difficult question: who decides which voices are preserved as art, and who gets excluded from the official record? The work, a 1937 Packard Touring Sedan covered in metallic-gold patterning, brings hip-hop lyrics and punk visual language onto the body of a luxury automobile. It will be the centerpiece of a free exhibition and discussion at CART Department in New York on September 26, with the exhibition continuing through September 27.
The vehicle’s split design is central to its argument. One side includes lyrics associated with Slick Rick, Chuck D and The Notorious B.I.G. The other uses punk manifestos connected to Joe Strummer and Jello Biafra, alongside visual language associated with the Sex Pistols. Rather than treating these references as a simple crossover playlist, the project places two youth cultures with strong anti-establishment identities into a shared visual frame.
A historic car as a moving archive
A 1937 Packard Touring Sedan is an unusually loaded surface for this material. Its age and luxury associations contrast sharply with the underground settings invoked by the project: hip-hop’s early Bronx communities and punk’s disaffected street-level energy. That tension appears intentional. The car gives words and imagery rooted in cultures often dismissed in their early years a place on an object commonly linked to prestige, permanence and institutional taste.
In this context, “archive” does not merely mean a storage room full of documents. It refers to the process by which culture is selected, preserved, displayed and explained to later audiences. An archive can make work easier to find and study, but it can also reflect unequal power: institutions, collectors and gatekeepers often have disproportionate influence over what is kept, how it is categorized and whose account becomes authoritative.
Fairey’s car makes that process visible by literally wrapping a recognized object of status in cultural material that emerged outside traditional art-world permission structures. The question is not whether hip-hop or punk must now qualify as art. The project instead raises the issue of who has historically been empowered to make that judgment in the first place.
The conversation: underground culture and institutional memory
Rocky Bucano, founder of The Hip Hop Museum, is bringing Grandwizzard Theodore and graffiti artist Eric Orr to the September 26 discussion. Their presence connects the art car’s broader themes to practitioners who represent different but intersecting elements of the cultural record.
Grandwizzard Theodore is credited here with inventing scratching in his Bronx bedroom in 1975. Scratching is a DJ technique in which a record is moved back and forth under a stylus to create a rhythmic, percussive sound. The technique became a fundamental part of hip-hop’s musical vocabulary. Theodore’s inclusion focuses attention on innovation that began in a domestic, local environment rather than an approved cultural venue.
Orr is described as a pioneering graffiti artist who developed alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Graffiti, like DJ practice, has often faced an uneven path toward recognition: it can be treated as an essential art movement in one context and as a marginal or unwelcome act in another. That makes it an especially relevant reference point for a panel concerned with the journey from underground practice to an archive.
“Hip-Hop has never needed permission to be art,” Bucano says. “It was art from the very first time a needle touched a record in a Bronx park.”
The statement offers the exhibition’s clearest position. Recognition by a museum, gallery or collector can affect visibility and preservation, but it does not create the artistic value of the culture being recognized. In other words, institutional acceptance may change access to audiences and historical records; it should not be mistaken for the moment a creative practice becomes legitimate.
Why put hip-hop and punk together?
The exhibition frames hip-hop and punk as cultures that emerged from similarly disinherited streets and from young people confronting the claim that they had no future. That does not mean the movements are identical. The supplied details point to separate creative languages: sampled records and lyrics on one side of the Packard; manifestos and a distinct visual vocabulary on the other.
But the pairing identifies a shared conflict with cultural gatekeeping. Both genres established powerful identities beyond the expectations of established institutions. Both developed aesthetics that could be confrontational, economical and immediately recognizable. Both also created their own methods for circulating meaning: records, performances, visual art, typography, clothing and community networks all carry history alongside more formal documents.
Fairey’s design avoids collapsing those differences into one generic idea of rebellion. By keeping the references physically divided across the car, it presents parallel histories in conversation. The result is less a claim that punk and hip-hop tell the same story than an invitation to consider why some stories are initially discounted, then later absorbed into the very cultural systems that once overlooked them.
Ten new works extend the argument
The car will be shown with ten new mixed-media works by Fairey inspired by it, as well as existing pieces. Mixed media means an artwork uses more than one material or method. In this case, the key point is that the exhibition does not isolate the Packard as a one-off spectacle. The additional works expand its themes of legitimacy, memory and authority across a larger installation.
That distinction matters for visitors. The automobile may provide the immediate visual hook, but the exhibition is structured as an argument rather than a display of decorative customization. The car, the new pieces and the existing work collectively ask how cultural memory is constructed—and what happens when the people who made a culture do not control the institutions that preserve it.
There is a useful parallel in other creative industries: preservation is never fully neutral. Games, music, comics, street art and live performance all face choices about which artifacts are saved, whose credits are recorded and whether the original social context survives alongside the object. For a different practical look at how cultural works can become inaccessible through platform systems, see this guide to why Apple Music songs can appear grayed out.
What visitors can take from the exhibition
The show is free and open to the public through September 27, making its subject matter available without the admission barrier that often accompanies high-profile art presentations. Visitors approaching the Packard can read it on several levels at once: as a carefully designed object, as a meeting point for lyric and manifesto, and as a challenge to assumptions about which materials belong in an art setting.
Its strongest idea may be the simplest. Cultural history is not only made when an institution files, frames or acquires something. It is made in bedrooms, parks, streets, clubs and communities long before that recognition arrives. Fairey’s gold Packard does not settle who owns that history. It makes the struggle over ownership, authorship and memory impossible to miss.
