Southeast, Kansas City students use hammers to turn '77 Cadillac into art

Something about this car looks different.

"One of the things somebody said is we want it to look like the car is vomiting its insides," said Kansas City Art Institute sophomore Mike Hall.

Sculpture students from the Kansas City Art Institute and Southeast Missouri State University joined Thursday to transform a white 1977 Cadillac into a work of art.

To accomplish the inside-out look, the students sprung open the car's hood like the belly of a dissected frog, with red mufflers that funneled toward the sky and exploded gear works.

Students worked at bedecking the outside of the vehicle with the car's wiring, lights and belts. They made the wiring snake out from spiraling drill holes past decorated hubcaps and strips of the exterior made to curl up like ribbons.

Revamping the vehicle required more than a little elbow grease and minimal delicacy.

"Our main tool around here is a two-pound sledgehammer," said Michael Wilkerson, interim chair of the sculpture department at the Kansas City Art Institute. "So it's like you yell 'Give me a screwdriver' and someone hands you a sledgehammer. That's just the way this project is working."

Students and teachers also gutted the vehicle and filled it with coal and pieces of a broken mirror. In order to give the inside an "aquarium effect," the students painted the windows white, leaving little peepholes for viewers to look through.

The artistic value of the white Cadillac donated by Twin City Auto of Scott City was too good to pass up, said participants.

"It was like a big white empty canvas or an empty thought or the empty paper that a poet writes on," Wilkerson said.

Earlier in the day, students sat in a circle and brainstormed ideas.

A collaborative project was new to some students. "I knew it was going to be a big hodgepodge of different ideas, so I tried to come in open-minded," said Southeast junior Jake Rust. "I'm usually more orderly as far as my art is concerned, but for this I put away my own preferences and tried to stay in a more haphazard mode as far as what I painted and how I worked."

The two schools collaborate on a project twice each semester; once in Kansas City and once in Cape Girardeau.

"I think it's really good for the students," said Paul Schock, professor of sculpture at Southeast. "When we go there it gives us a chance to see the art galleries and the art scene in Kansas City, and when they come here they get to experience a university as opposed to an institute, and they get to experience a more rural environment."

Schock said future projects may include floating artwork and, he hopes, working with an abandoned building.

He hopes the car will be displayed somewhere on campus in upcoming weeks, but those hoping to get an earlier look can come to the garage in back of the art building.

tgreaney@semissourian.com

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