David Best

View Spark segment on David Best. Original air date: August 2003. (Running Time: 9:07)

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Cut it, tweak it, weld it, and crank it up to your wildest imagination. Welcome to the creative obsession of the art car world with grand crankster David Best, the modern master of assemblage who has transformed more than 30 vehicles into mobile works of art. In the Spark episode "Art Meets Pop Culture," tag along as Best and his team transform a 1973 Cadillac into a 40-foot rocket car, their mode of transportation at the 2003 Burning Man Festival.

In creating his art cars, Best strips vehicles down to the core before reconstructing them, striving to make the car's original form unrecognizable. Rather than merely gluing objects to the body of a car, Best, who religiously goes to the dump, likes to use found object materials that ultimately take on their own personality. After making 30 art cars and 2 buses, Best has worked with over 10,000 people. The car artist attributes his success to his collaborators, as he believes a mixture of talents is what brings spark to his projects.

Based in Petaluma, Best's work has been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the di Rosa Preserve, where the collection includes Best's "Rhinocar" and "Mother Tina's Car."