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Gilmore Car Museum 6865 W Hickory Rd. Hickory Corners, Michigan May 2017

Brick Pontiac makes its way to the Gilmore Car Museum Daniel Strohl Oct 18th, 2016 www.hemmings.com/blog/2016/10/18/brick-pontiac-makes-its-...

The old 1940 Pontiac took her on her honeymoon. It brought both of her children home from the hospital. It carried her family from one move to the next all over the country. If Aileene Blincoe could have any car in the whole world, she’d choose that Pontiac, so her sculptor daughter brought it back for her, and now the car – all 12,000 pounds of it – has a permanent home at the Gilmore Car Museum.

Though rendered as an art project that envisions an old car in a mortared form, that’s about all Paula Collins‘s sculpture, titled “Mom’s Favorite Car,” has in common with artist Wolf Vostell’s concrete-encased Cadillac. Paula, who normally works in bas relief and whose work has been featured at the 1996 Summer Olympics and in other public spaces around the country, said she got the idea for sculpting a car – specifically her parents’ first car – out of brick after visiting the annual ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, four years ago.

“We had been talking at that time about what car out of any car in the world we’d have, and she immediately said the 1940 Pontiac,” Collins said. “She always wished she could have it back. I’m not sure what made it her favorite, though I’m sure it was partly that time of her life.”

When Aileene and George Blincoe married in 1945, not only was the Pontiac they bought soon after in Fort Scott, Kansas – for $200, so the story goes – the first car Aileene owned, it was the first she rode in. George’s Navy and teaching career took him, Aileene, and the car to Corpus Christi, Texas, immediately afterward, and when he built up enough leave time, the Pontiac took them to Mexico on their deferred honeymoon. Nine months later, the Pontiac became Paula’s first car ride, and a couple years later it did the same for a second George Blincoe.

“I don’t remember the Pontiac – we replaced it with a 1953 or 1954 Chevrolet after we moved to Washington, D.C. – but my mother still has many black and white images of that car,” Paula said. “Dad loved to travel, so it was how we visited family. It was our early mobile home.”

With the decision to enter a brick version of the Blincoe Pontiac in ArtPrize made, Paula immediately applied but soon realized she wouldn’t be able to finish the sculpture in time for the next year’s ArtPrize competition, or the following year’s. Even with 32,000 pounds of brick donated by a nearby brick foundry – Acme Brick in Denton, Texas – Paula didn’t have any experience building a life-size sculpture like this “and it wasn’t like anybody else had either.”

Still, she cleaned out her one-car garage and began carving. “I didn’t give up,” she said. Over a period of three years – including a seven-month stretch that consisted entirely of carving, eating, and sleeping – she shaped the car, numbered the locations of each brick, disassembled the sculpture for firing at Acme, and then reassembled it, doing all the bricklaying herself.

“I couldn’t find a bricklayer around who would mess with it, so I did it myself,” Paula said. “It was a totally personal odyssey.”

With the middle hollowed out – Paula likens it to a “car igloo” now – and the excess chipped away, the sculpture still weighed in at six tons, and she still had a road trip of her own to make from Denton to Grand Rapids. And just as in her early childhood road trips, she’d make this one with her brother and Aileene, fittingly with a stop in Fort Scott along the way.

“The story about ‘Mom’s Favorite Car’ may be about her experience – but it’s a nostalgia that is felt by all,” Paula wrote in a description of the sculpture. “Sometimes a means of transport has a way of entering our memories and those memories are a precious commodity.”

Though she had hoped to find a buyer for the sculpture at ArtPrize, she instead found a home for it with the Gilmore Car Museum, which lies just a couple miles from Aileene’s home near Hickory Corners.

As for similar projects – Paula said she had thought about sculpting her first car, a Volkswagen Beetle – Paula said the Pontiac will likely be both the first and last of its kind that she’ll attempt, unless future builds take place on location. “This is literally off the wall for me,” she said.

The Gilmore is currently looking for a spot on its 90-acre campus to feature the sculpture and then plans a permanent base for it on that spot. Once installed, the museum plans to host an unveiling event, perhaps in the spring, according to Jay Follis, the museum’s director of marketing.

For more information on the Gilmore Car Museum, visit GilmoreCarMuseum.org.

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