Running on fumes, an iconic SF art car cries for help

When artist, fabricator, and part-time metal-detectorist Jes Muse saw a 1990 Volvo 240 with 300,000 miles and the words “I SUCK DICK” scratched into the side, she wasn’t immediately interested in buying it. 

Alas, her wife Carol ultimately convinced Muse to buy the jalopy for $1,800. They’d deal with the paint job later. 

“It’s especially comical since I am very gay,” Muse, who lives in the Bayview, told The Standard. “I drove around with it like that for a year.”

Once she got around to repainting the car, though, she really went for it.

Muse wrapped the car in vinyl and hand-painted it with a head-to-toe rendition of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian’s blocky primary colors. 

The car became an instant icon.

People snapped photos as it drove through San Francisco streets. Named Tegelsten — Swedish for “brick,” a nickname Volvo wagons earned from the 1970s through the ’90s for their boxy designs and sturdy infrastructure — it has made waves on social media for years.  

But after seven years, $8,400 in repairs, and another 60,000 miles, Muse’s Mondrian Volvo has come to a complete stop. Its current status? Unroadworthy until further notice.

The cylinder head is cracked, the car is “leaking oil like crazy,” the vinyl paint job is peeling, and earlier this month, the transmission started leaking. At the end of the day, repairs for Tegelsten come to $3,000.

Living paycheck to paycheck, Muse has turned to GoFundMe to crowdsource extra cash to pay her mechanic bills. 

“The car is 34 years old, so shit happens, but these are two pretty big-ticket items,” Muse said. “I get paid once a month and have a considerable amount of credit card debt I’m trying to reduce. [My wife and I] pay a mortgage, and I pay for my wife’s health care. I will run out of money at the end of the month.”

Muse, who now works as a facility and operations manager at a private school in San Mateo, has put so much into the car that it’s hard to imagine saying goodbye. 

After a year of driving the Volvo around with the keyed graffiti in place, Muse had an epiphany about how to remedy her car’s cosmetic issue while helping to install a show of vinyl paintings at the the Museum of Craft and Design, where she used to work. Muse compared pricing for a DIY project to spray jobs from local wrap shops.  

“I called around to a couple wrap shops, and it was just as expensive as doing a respray — around $3,000,” she said. “It dawned on me that I could cover my car in vinyl. So I just decided to do it myself.”

Muse made friends with local fabricators who had extra vinyl, hunted for scraps on eBay, and bought rolls of vinyl tape to make her utopian car painting a reality. 

“I just started applying it and eyeballing it as I went,” she said.

Mondrian also eyeballed his paintings, incidentally.

“It was a very organic process,” she said. “I freaked out yesterday thinking about the transmission, and I thought, ‘I’m going to have to total my car.’ And I don’t want to do that. I love my car — something about Volvos from that era, the boxiness, the utility — it’s just perfect.”

She also feels like she owes it to the car’s fans to keep it on the road. “I feel a responsibility to the people who like it so much, and it’s just become a part of that history of San Francisco being a place that attracts creatives,” Muse said.

Muse’s Mondrain Volvo is not the first in the Bay Area, though it very well may be one of the last. In 2020, the iconic Mondrian house on the Great Highway was painted over, and a number of other Mondrian cars once present in the Bay Area have either disappeared without a trace or landed in museums. 

The Mondrian houseboat in Sausalito, however, is still afloat. 

In an attempt to make extra money, Muse has doubled down on her side hustle: using a metal detector to find people’s lost items for cash.

Recently, she’s been searching for a couple’s platinum engagement ring for a winning prize of $3,000 — roughly what it would cost to remediate her car’s troubles.

“The first weekend, I spent like 13 hours looking, and I didn’t find it,” she said. “I’m hoping to get out there again for a few more hours, but I’ll have to ride my bike this time.” 

When asked how much longer Muse expects to run this car, she sighed. 

“Until they pry the keys from my cold, dead hands.”

To donate to Muse’s GoFundMe campaign, visit this link.