It All Adds Up

"It's not something you see every day, obviously," Ben Breen of Bentonville said after his ride in a new permanent art installation at 21c Museum Hotel in Bentonville. "It's really cool. I've never ridden around in a car that old!"

Breen, 13, his mother and younger bother were among the first visitors on June 19 to take a complimentary ride around the downtown square in the completely refurbished 1962 Fleetwood Cadillac limousine -- which also happens to be covered in about 30,000 pennies, nickels and dimes.

Artist Monica Mahoney of Louisville, Ky., was commissioned to create an art car for 21c in Bentonville after designing two for the original hotel in Louisville a few years ago.

"We really enjoyed having the experience of the art cars available to the guests," Alice Stites, chief curator of 21c Museum Hotels, says of the cars at their Louisville location. "It was natural to commission Monica again."

In development since the hotel opened in 2013, the new art car was finally finished in May and put on display in front of the museum in early June.

"I anticipated about six months for the coins, and I was on time with that, but the car took a really long time," Mahoney says. "The car was in really bad shape when the owner of 21c found it on eBay, so there was a lot of waiting while they searched for parts and even built parts for the car. They had to replace almost everything."

When the finished product rolled into Bentonville last month, the plush black and rust-colored interior leather and fluffy black carpeting all looked brand new. The exterior also got a makeover, with nearly 600 pounds worth of coins covering the car in lines and designs. Mahoney says her inspiration for using coins came from Sam Walton's Five & Dime Store.

"When I was researching the history of Bentonville, I just found so much about Wal-Mart and how it started as the five-and-dime," Mahoney says. "And I really like art cars with texture, so I thought, 'Oh, I'll use nickels and dimes to cover the car.' And so with the art piece, I was really exploring the relativity of value and how little value we see in a penny, but how [Wal-Mart] 'shaves pennies' off the cost of everything, and that's what's really making the difference."

Mahoney says she likes the idea that everyone will see something different in the art. Some people will look at the coins, which add up to roughly $950, and say, "This looks like a lot of money," while others look at the same car and say, "This doesn't seem like that much at all."

To form straight lines on the car and keep them even, Mahoney had to cut, bend and sand coins. She also devoted a lot of time to separating the shiny pennies from the medium shiny from the tarnished ones, in order to create the patterns she envisioned. Most of the pennies Mahoney used were 1962 uncirculated pennies, but she says there are also other interesting finds on the car.

"I kind of hid some cool things on the car -- steel pennies, Indian-head nickels, really old coins -- anything interesting I came across during the process," Mahoney says. "I hope people enjoy exploring it and it makes them smile, because maybe each time they look at it, they see something different."

One of the more obvious designs on the car is the bar code pattern on the hood. Another tie-in to Wal-Mart, it is the bar code for the thing the superstore sells the most of -- bananas.

"It was so interesting to me how these simple black and white lines represent numbers and allow companies to be as large as they are," Mahoney says. "Because of these bars, [companies] are able to change the price of something around the world by a penny with just the flip of a switch."

Like the art cars at the 21c in Louisville, Mahoney's "Making Change" will be a permanent fixture at the Bentonville Museum Hotel. But more than just an exhibit, the car can be rented by the hour and will take passengers just about anywhere.

"I hope they just enjoy it," Mahoney says, "because I think there's not a lot of art pieces you get to ride around in."

NAN What's Up on 07/10/2015