From McAllen to Reno, Lowriders Spent the Fall Inside Museums

For most of its history, lowriding was something the authorities tried to keep off the street. Cruising bans, traffic stops and city ordinances aimed at slow-rolling Chevys were part of the story for decades. So there is something worth pausing on in the fact that, this fall, two museums in two states had lowriders on the floor at the same time, with a third lined up for December.

In McAllen, Texas, the International Museum of Art & Science is hosting the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition Lowrider Culture in the United States / Cultura Lowrider en los Estados Unidos from Aug. 22 through Nov. 15. In Reno, the National Automobile Museum opened a lowrider exhibit on Oct. 10 built around a local club, Frame Off Family, which runs through Nov. 5. And the Tucson Desert Art Museum has the Smithsonian show booked from Dec. 5 through March 7, 2027.

The Smithsonian show

The traveling exhibition is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in collaboration with the National Museum of American History, according to IMAS. It received federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino. In McAllen, it is locally supported by Clark Chevrolet and Clark Knapp Honda.

This is not a car corral. The show is built mainly on photographs and interpretation. IMAS describes it as a look at the American experience through lowrider culture, focusing on the post-World War II Mexican American community and treating lowriding as an art form tied to identity, innovation and entrepreneurship. It covers the customized vehicles and the craft behind them, and how the tradition spread into popular culture in the U.S. and abroad.

The images the museums are using to promote it say a lot about the tone. IMAS leads with a Día de los Muertos caravan photographed by Bob Bernal Jr. in Los Angeles in 2020, and a shot by Wendy Random of the Tristate Lowrider Car Club in Manhattan in 2021, a black Cadillac up on three wheels on a city street lined with Mexican flags. That second one is a reminder that this culture is not only a Southwest story. It is in New York, too.

The Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center in Anaheim, which hosted the show from Sept. 13 through Dec. 14, 2025, summed up the thesis in its own description: lowriding is a Latino tradition started by Mexican American communities in the 1940s to assert their space, "infused with Latino/a soul, entrepreneurship, and ingenuity."

Reno's version is all cars, and all local

The Reno exhibit is a different animal. KOLO's Noah Bond reported that the National Automobile Museum's show features customized lowrider cars, motorcycles, bicycles and pedal cars from Northern Nevada and Northern California, many of them award winners and many shown together at the museum for the first time. The main participating club is Frame Off Family, and this is its fourth year bringing an exhibit to the museum, according to KOLO.

Museum president Phil MacDougall gave KOLO the plain version of why a museum with more than 200 cars in its collection keeps making room for lowriders. "Because it's got a great community," he said. He also offered the line that every lowrider owner has heard some version of from a stranger: "Some of this, you know, cost more than my house costs."

“

Each one is very unique.

MacDougall told the station the museum rotates in a new exhibit roughly every 60 days, and he called this one "a family event." That last part is the point. Lowrider clubs are family operations, often multiple generations deep, and a pedal car parked next to a full show car is exactly how the culture brings kids in.

Tucson closes the year with a car show in the parking lot

Tucson is planning the most hands-on version of the three. The Tucson Desert Art Museum says it is partnering with the Smithsonian to bring the show in from Dec. 5, and it is adding local photography, cars, bikes and gear from lowrider car clubs across the Old Pueblo. It has also scheduled a lowrider car show in the museum's east parking lot on Jan. 16, 2027, with cars from all decades, awards, booths, music, dancing and children's games. Car show entry is free, the museum says, while exhibition entry is $10 for adults and free for kids under 18.

The museum's own promotional photo for the show is a blue Impala at the Marigold Parade in Albuquerque in 2010, shot by Gabriela E. Campos, with a mariachi standing beside it. The local support in Tucson comes from the Anna Cohen Foundation, according to the museum.

Why the museum moment matters

It is fair to be a little skeptical whenever a living street culture gets framed and hung on a wall. Museums can flatten things, and a lowrider is meant to move. But the way these shows are built answers some of that. The Smithsonian exhibition is bilingual and photograph driven, centered on the people and communities rather than auction values. Reno hands the floor to a local club. Tucson is literally putting the cars back on pavement outside.

It also lands at a moment when the legal climate is finally shifting the other way. As Jalopnik has reported, California passed AB 436 in late 2023 to legalize cruising, and in September Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2541 creating a lowrider specialty license plate, with his office saying cruising bans and restrictions on lowered vehicles "criminalized cultural expression." Seeing the same culture in Smithsonian-backed galleries in Texas and Arizona completes the picture. Lowriding spent decades being treated as a nuisance. This fall, from the Rio Grande Valley to the high desert of Nevada, it was treated as history and as art, and the clubs were in the room when it happened.