A TRAVELING PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION
Latinos on Wheels:
Lowriders of Texas
Al Rendon's decades-long documentary project on Mexican-American lowrider culture across Texas — the craftsmanship, the community, and the people who built it. Now touring to museums statewide.
About the Exhibition
For the past several years, San Antonio photographer Al Rendon has traveled across Texas documenting lowrider clubs — from garages and car shows to Sunday cruises — building an intimate visual record of a culture built on craftsmanship, family, and pride.
The resulting body of work pairs formal portraits of builders and their families with detailed studies of paint, chrome, and hydraulics, presenting the cars not as vehicles but as sculpture: hand-built, hand-painted, and hand-me-down.
For the current exhibition at the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa, Al collaborated with local lowriders to assemble additional artifacts -- including lowrider cars, a bicycle, and a child's pedal car -- and to prepare opening day events with a local emphasis.
The exhibition is scalable to gallery space, available in a range of print sizes, and can be paired with a community car show and artist talk for opening weekend.
Artist Statement
Making art with a camera is not about getting the technically perfect photo. It’s more about having a vision and following through with it, photo after photo after photo. My entire career has explored and documented the Mexican American culture in Texas — not the sanitized version, not the folkloric version produced for outsiders, but the real thing, in people’s homes and at their celebrations and on their streets.
My most recent work documents the Texas lowrider community. Lowriding has deep roots in Mexican American life. The culture emerged here in Texas fifty years ago, as young Chicanos took the most American of objects, the automobile, and transformed it into something that reflected who they were. Where mainstream car culture pointed toward speed, lowriders pointed toward beauty, craftsmanship, and community. "Low and slow" — bajito y suavecito — was a deliberate refusal to be invisible.
Lowriding took root in San Antonio, El Paso, Odessa, and the barrios of Dallas and Fort Worth, evolving alongside Texas Mexican American life. Car clubs became community anchors — places where knowledge was shared, where fathers taught sons and mothers taught daughters, where the work on a single car could span years and involve an entire family. The paint jobs grew more elaborate, the hydraulics more precise, the upholstery more intricate. The cars became, as one Texas lowrider put it, a way of expressing that "the Latino can make something as American as a car reflect our culture."
What I find in the lowrider community is the same thing I have always found in this culture: people who have built something beautiful, who insist on being seen on their own terms, who carry their heritage forward without apology. The lowrider is not just a car. It is a family heirloom, a rolling artwork, a statement of pride and belonging passed from one generation to the next. That is what I am here to document — and it is, at its heart, exactly what I have always been documenting.
Lowriders in Texas
Every lowrider is a story told in candy paint and chrome.
To make one masterpiece! It's everything, these cars are an art form, from the chrome to the paint to the interior to the pin striping to the patterns.
Everybody who touches these cars is an artist whether you're the mechanic or you're actually the artist or the builder."
Austin (2Tonez) Harvill / Marion, Texas
Lowrider culture took root in Mexican-American communities across the Southwest in the mid-20th century, and Texas — especially San Antonio, home to one of the state's largest and oldest lowrider communities — has been central to its growth ever since.
A lowrider is a vehicle deliberately lowered, customized with hydraulic suspension, and finished with intricate paint and upholstery work, often over months or years of labor. The style began as an act of self-expression and, for many builders, quiet resistance to mainstream car culture — slow and low instead of loud and fast.
Clubs organize around family and neighborhood, passing skills and cars down through generations. Today, Texas lowrider culture spans car clubs in San Antonio, Houston, Dallas / Fort Worth, Odessa, Laredo, the Rio Grande Valley, and beyond — each with its own style, history, and community events.
Scenes from the exhibition
Here are some photographs of the exhibition at the Ellen Noël Art Museum in Odessa, Texas. These photos offer a sampling of what might be included -- beyond Al's photography -- to attract and inform a local museum audience, such as cars, bicycles, and other artifacts from local lowrider clubs.
The standard exhibition includes a documentary video about the lowrider experience; an artist statement banner (43”x 100”); 7 photographic banners (43”x100"); 27 photographs of different sizes (24”x 28”, 19”x 22.5”, 17”x18.5"), mounted in frames that were hand-carved by Al's father; one large, framed panoramic photograph (24" x 72"); and one custom painted metal panel (30”x30”).
Lowrider artifacts collected specifically for this exhibition include a custom painted pedal car, a custom lowrider bicycle, and one 1979 Thunderbird Lowrider car.
The Odessa exhibition was largely funded by a combination of local museum-affiliated patrons and additional sponsors associated with Al Rendon.
Selected Images
Here is a selection of works from the exhibition. You can see more of Al's lowrider photography on his website's lowrider gallery.
Programming Options
Available to accompany the exhibition and drive opening-weekend attendance.
Artist Talk
Al Rendon speaks on the project, the culture, and the people behind the cars. Q&A format, 45–60 minutes.
Community Car Show
Local lowrider clubs bring builds to the museum grounds — a proven draw for new and family audiences.
Panel & Family Proramming
Optional panel with builders and club members, plus kid-friendly activities tied to the exhibition themes.
Exhibition History
'Latinos on Wheels' has appeared at these Texas museums, where it has attracted large, engaged family audiences, both for the photography itself and for related events, such as local car club displays.
2026
Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum
Related work featured in "Carros y Cultura: Lowriding Legacies in Texas," Austin.
2026
Ellen Noël Art Museum
"Latinos on Wheels: Lowrides of Tejas" on view August thru November, in Odessa, Texas.
Al Rendon
Al Rendon is a San Antonio-born photographer whose nearly 50-year career has centered on documenting the culture and spirit of Mexican Americans in Texas.
Over the years, Al has created multiple series of work: photos of Conjunto and Tejano musicians; retratos or portraits of San Antonio artists and cultural leaders; charreada photos that documented the pageantry of the Mexican rodeo; the remarkably diverse representations of the Virgen de Guadalupe in everything from murals to tattoos; Faces of Resiliency — portraits of seniors making their way through the pandemic; and a series of photos capturing the human impact of the mass shooting in Uvalde.
That same commitment to cultural witness now extends to the Texas lowrider community, whose elaborately crafted cars, car clubs, and deep-rooted traditions represent a living expression of Mexican American identity.
Al’s archival prints are held in the permanent collections of art institutions throughout North and South America, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Wittliff Collections, and the Mexican American Museum of Art in Chicago. In 2023, San Antonio’s Witte Museum presented Mi Cultura: Bringing Shadows into the Light, a major retrospective of his five-decade body of work.
Bring 'Latinos on Wheels' to your Museum
Contact Al Rendon at 210.288.4900 or through the Contact Form on alrendon.com
© 2026 by Al Rendon