Meet The Artist Shaking Up Male-Dominated Lowrider Culture (With A Hot Pink Cadillac)

“You’re into lowriding, right?”

It’s a question multidisciplinary artist Jacqueline Valenzuela says she hears often. So often, in fact, it makes her laugh.

“It’s literally my life,” Valenzuela recently told How To LA host Brian De Los Santos. “I don't know how to better explain it. It's merged into my art practice. I have a car. My studio's in an auto body shop. Like, I can't escape it.”

The car is a 1975 Cadillac Eldorado that Valenzuela has named, “La Playgirl.”

Jacqueline Valenzuela with her lowrider "La Playgirl." Valenzuela highlights women and the LGBTQ+ community in lowriding culture through her artwork and the car club she helped found.

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“She’s hot pink, which I always think is funny because I hated pink growing up and now I have a hot pink car," Valenzuela said. "It’s very much playing on the idea of an alter ego, like a woman that’s in charge.”

Elevating women

One area in which Valenzuela has taken charge is highlighting other women like her in the lowrider community. Like her friend Ashley — a nail technician who does lowrider-inspired nails. Or another friend, Monique, who she’s painted three times and whose son now wants to pursue an arts degree, like Jacqueline did.

Jacqueline Valenzuela is a Chicana artist and founder of the Prophets Car Club.

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Valenzuela's workspace at her studio/auto shop (The Kolor Studio) in the City of Industry.

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“For so long women in the [lowrider] space were just looked at as eye candy or like models,” Valenzuela said. “And yeah, some women do own cars and model with their cars. That's amazing. [But] there's also women that don't model with their cars and sometimes they're not given that platform, so I strive to do that through my art practice.”

Her studio space in the city of Industry, which she shares with her fiancé Mark Hocutt, is also partly an auto shop. In the front is an office and a space for Jacqueline to paint on canvases, a panel for a hand-painted mural on a car, or to work on an installation. In the back is the auto shop, with classic cars that Mark — a custom car painter — is working on.

“Whenever I need inspiration I literally just walk back there and I’m like, Oh I can paint this,” Valenzuela said. “Sometimes it’ll be something as simple as seeing tires that are arranged a certain way and I’ll want to paint that.”

Her art, her car

She describes her style of art as “hybrid” with realistic depictions of people, cars, and places mixed in with more abstract elements — like the use of pixels and bold color choices.

A painting by Jaqueline Valenzuela.

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“If you look at my art, you see that I like almost an off putting amount of color, and that's what I like on cars too,” she said. “I want to see patterns that don't make sense together or that look weird together.”

And while the combination of her love of lowriders and fine art makes sense to her, it’s not always obvious to others.

“It’s funny that in the art world, sometimes I'm not taken seriously because of the lowrider aspect, but then in the lowrider world, sometimes I'm not taken seriously because of the fine art aspect,” she said.

While it used to bother her, Valenzuela said, it doesn’t anymore. And the people that know her know that she has real cred in both worlds.

She gained the confidence to pursue fine art as a career while getting her art degree at Cal State Long Beach, and her work is now in galleries and museums. (Currently, she has a solo show at Arts at Blue Roof in South L.A.)

She also grew up in Whittier, where she was around lowriders all the time. And she took a three-year hiatus from fine art to work in an auto shop painting lowriders.

Inclusion matters

Valenzuela and Hocutt both also co-founded — along with their friend Jesse Jaramillo — a car club called Prophets that welcomes women and people who identify as LGBTQ+.

Valenzuela helped found the Prophets Car Club which encourages women and LGBTQ+ membership.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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Details from Valenzuela's lowrider "La Playgirl."

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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“There's still lowrider car clubs that have laws and bylaws that don't allow women to even sit in on their car club meetings,” Valenzuela said. “There is still a lot of that point of view that, ‘Oh, you're queer? That's not normal.’”

“I feel like it's so embedded in [Chicano] culture that unfortunately it's gone into the lowrider community as well," Valenzuela added. "That's why we thought it was important to carve out a space for ourselves and make sure that people that we love and really care for feel safe in the space that we're like making for ourselves in the lowrider community.”

To see more of Jacqueline Valenzuela’s work, check out the recent special, all-female edition of Lowrider Magazine. 

She also has an exhibition open through June 1 at Arts at Blue Roof in South L.A. and this fall will have her first solo museum show at the Bakersfield Museum of Art.