After an off-roading adventure in Baja Mexico where her canvas was dragged through the desert, Artist Heidi Mraz unveils an out-of-this-world portrait honoring the modern version of Steve McQueen’s Boot
“Move. Earth.” is a stunning, new assemblage from Heidi Mraz’s “Art of Provenance” series that features the SCG Boot as it raced amid a whirlwind of silt in the 2021 NORRA Mexican 1000.
The artist photographed and gathered more than 7,000 pieces of relevant material and jumped in a chase vehicle to visually capture this extreme off-road adventure.
Image: James Glickenhaus, Heidi Mraz and Jason McCarthy pictured at the unveiling of “Move. Earth.” at Concours for a Cure on September 18th. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
GREAT FALLS, VA (September 20, 2022) – This past weekend, Artist and Documentarian Heidi Mraz unveiled
“Move. Earth.,” a stunning 3 x 4.5 ft mixed-media work that documents ‘the significant history and genesis of the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus Boot’ and this all-terrain vehicle’s first off-road race in Mexico. The unveiling took place at Concours for a Cure in Westhampton, New York on Sunday in coordination with Kids for Kids to benefit the Cohen Children’s Medical Center, where the featured SCG Boot was also on display.
Image: The SCG Boot racing the 2021 NORRA Mexican 1000 with plumes of silt trailing behind. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
To capture the exhilarating driving experience of the Boot for her clients Jason McCarthy and Nat Mundy from HK Motorcars, Heidi joined the race vehicle and its team in Baja last year for the NORRA Mexican 1000, a treacherous, 1000-mile, off-road desert race, despite being known as the ‘Happiest Race on Earth’. For this artwork, the canvas was tied to the back of the SCG Boot and dragged through the desert terrain. At night, the canvas was used as ground cover while the pit crew worked on the vehicle. Grease and grime from mechanics’ hands were wiped on the canvas leaving an indelible mark of the day's events.
Image: Crew members using Heidi Mraz’s canvas as ground cover while working on the SCG Boot during the NORRA. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
Image: The HK Motorcars crew standing in front of the SCG Boot just before the start of the NORRA. Pictured from left to right: Nat Mundy, Darren Skilton, Jason McCarthy, Heidi Mraz, Robert Thomasson, Elliot Pollock and Tino Baglione. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
“When my client invited me to participate in the NORRA 1000 to document his first desert race in the SCG Boot, I had to pinch myself! It was on my bucket list,” said Artist and Documentarian Heidi Mraz. “So, in order to capture this exhilarating experience as a lasting retrospective, I needed to do something unforgettable with my canvas so that the artwork would become a montage of memories and history. For collectors and racers like Jason, a piece like ‘Move. Earth.’ is so much more than art because it is created to celebrate and share a vehicle’s story along with the people and culture that surround it in an artful way.”
Image: Darren Skilton and Jason McCarthy pictured with the SCG Boot before the race. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
When asked why this piece of art is special to him, Client Jason McCarthy shared, “This piece represents the extraordinary experience we had racing the Boot in the NORRA 1000, my first off-road race and also the first time driving this road-legal SCG Boot anywhere. It was amazing to work with legendary off-road racer Darren Skilton and be supported by Elliot Pollock and his team at Armada during the five-day race event. The best parts were racing through the mountains and topping 100 mph through giant cactus fields. It was the best time I’d ever had driving anything, anywhere,” he said. “When I look at ‘Move. Earth.’ I get to relive that race, and all the emotions and excitement return. It’s a very personal and moving piece of art, and I’m grateful for Heidi’s ability as an artist to have captured all that magic.”
Image: Drivers exercising the SCG Boot during pre-run for the NORRA Mexican 1000. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
“Move. Earth.” in Detail
This strikingly bold work depicts the SCG Boot as it races across a sand dune in Baja lifting thick plumes of desert silt. Spotlighted against a dark night sky, the vehicle appears to be extraterrestrial under the soft glow of the giant Super Moon of 2021, which is the same moon the crew witnessed while on the NORRA. The relationship between the moon and the desert also pays homage to Vic Hickey, the man who engineered both the original Baja Boot and the Lunar Rover that is still on the moon today.
Image: A close-up of some of the thousands of elements used to create the color and movement in the portrait “Move. Earth.” Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
From original location photography to the acquisition of historical documents, magazine articles, racecourse books, photos and other sources, thousands of images were carefully culled, curated and hand-cut to create this extraordinary, multi-dimensional and historically-based piece of art. With her optically-rich, signature approach to collage made through the deconstruction of many materials and then the reconstruction of one illusory subject, Heidi plays with how the mind sees and perceives objects that then beg for further investigation
Image: The SCG Boot racing the 2021 NORRA Mexican 1000. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz.
The Backstory
Through meticulous efforts, Heidi has visually archived on a single canvas the story of how the SCG Boot came to be after James Glickenhaus was inspired to recreate a modern road version of the original Steve McQueen Boot. Fifty years after the original vehicle first raced the Baja 1000, the Glickenhaus Boot debuted in 2019 after 1 1/2 years of development and proved the project to be a wild success when it won its class against Ford’s Bronco R prototype. To capture the exhilarating driving experience, as well as all of the vehicle’s significant history, Heidi joined her clients from HK Motorcars, professional off-road racer Darren Skilton, Elliot Pollock and the crew from Armada Engineering, who built the vehicle for SCG, down in Baja last year where she experienced first-hand the SCG Boot’s amazing journey driving the NORRA.
Image: The SCG Boot racing in the 2021 NORRA Mexican 1000. Photo courtesy of Heidi Mraz
“When I saw the Boot, I realized it was the same vehicle that Hunter Thompson wrote about in ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, recovering McQueen and the myth, and so I immediately wanted to buy it when it came up for auction years ago,” said James Glickenhaus, General Partner of Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus. “Then I realized that I wanted to make a modern version of it. It’s by doing crazy things that you sometimes learn what you are doing, and we ended up creating an exceptional vehicle. I love that Jason asked Heidi to document his race through her artwork because only the mad brilliance of an artist could truly commemorate the tremendous journey we all shared."
About Heidi Mraz
Represented in both corporate and private collections, Heidi Mraz’s artwork is collected and exhibited internationally. Her clients include some of the world’s foremost automotive collectors, brands, and museums. In 2022, she unveiled “Move. Earth.”, a tribute to the modern-day version of Steve McQueen’s Baja Boot, and in 2021, she unveiled “Aerodynamics by Entomology” and “Shaped by the Wind” honoring Porsche’s 917 and 906, respectively. In 2019, she unveiled “Beneath the Surface: Bugatti of Lake Maggiore,” an automotive assemblage inspired by the Mullin Automotive Museum’s famed “Lady of the Lake” that had been submerged underwater for 75 years. A member of the Guild of Motoring Artists, Heidi is also an Artist Pro Tem for the prestigious Torpedo Factory Art Center in Virginia. She has been the official poster artist for Pinehurst Concours d’Elegance in North Carolina and for the Art in Motion Concours in New York, and was commissioned to paint the winning cars of the Amelia Island and Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. Heidi is a consulting curator for The White Collection in San Francisco and has judged several major American concours. Currently in production, a feature-length documentary entitled “AUTOMOTIVE ARTIFACTS” chronicles the behind-the-scenes work of Heidi’s history-inspired assemblages. Heidi Mraz Fine Art is based in the artist’s hometown of Great Falls, Virginia. www.heidimraz.com.