People toot their horns, they wave, they exclaim “ooo, what a cool car,” they rush their kids over for a closer look whenever Elizabeth Barnard drives Frida Kar-lo, an “art car” designed by her students at El Colegio Charter School in Minneapolis, Minn. The van, an homage to Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, was created in 2002 and recently given a facelift.
Barnard served in the Peace Corps in Peru and worked for decades as a freelance graphic designer, naturalist, furniture designer and woodworker. Then this “devout generalist” took a teaching job at a bilingual charter high school that focuses on the arts and the environment and specializes in project-based learning. When artist-in-residence B.J. Zander proposed an art car, the students did body work on Barnard’s van, painted it, researched Kahlo and created this rolling tribute.
As the years passed, Minnesota sun, rain and snow degraded the varnish used to adhere Kahlo images to the van. So last summer, another set of students tackled the van, choosing this time to treat the vehicle’s surfaces as a mural. Painting in the manner of Kahlo (1907-1954), they decorated every exterior surface with the connected eyebrows, animal familiars, hair ornaments and clouds featured in so many of the artist’s self-portraits. The value of this ’89 Plymouth Grand Voyager, still running strong at 155,000 miles, goes “way up or way down, depending on who is looking at it,” Barnard says. For her, though, it’s a priceless reminder of how, as a teacher, she loves “being part of it when somebody learns to do something. . . . That’s such a cool moment.”
