Autry and Rob Pruitt Turned a Gas Station Chrome
Art Basel’s Miami edition is where things are shiny and sun-drenched—the perfect setting for Autry to celebrate its creative collaboration with contemporary artist Rob Pruitt. Famed for his provocative and playful work, Pruitt was invited to entirely reimagine Autry’s classic sneaker silhouette, and, true to the artist’s signature style, the finished shoe has a strong whiff of the pop-kitsch. The laces are inflatable, and the whole thing is chrome—what more could you want?
To mark the collaboration, Autry transformed an entire gas station into a chrome-covered, retro-futuristic spectacle. Welcome, everyone, to the AUTRY ART STATION. Inspired by Pruitt's "Silver Tires" artwork, the event’s aesthetic fused space-age metallic elements with a gritty, gas-guzzling vibe—its neon pinks and slimy greens could have been plucked straight out of Cyberpunk. Attendees enjoyed classic gas station snacks—packaged with a playful twist, of course—and were lucky enough to admire the artist's silver tires in the flesh.
While it’s nearly impossible to pin down a singular Rob Pruitt “style,” his work over a long and varied career has consistently blended humor, pop culture, vibrant use of color, and a cheeky sense of irony. If you happen to be at Art Basel, you can also catch other of his works exhibited by the renowned Massimo de Carlo gallery. Perhaps not as controversial as his stunts in the '90s, this more recent work is a more thoughtful, introspective take on color, landscape, and time. Always unpredictable, endlessly inventive, and often controversial, Pruitt remains a true maverick of the contemporary art scene.
In advance of Art Basel, we gave Pruitt a call to discuss the inspiration behind Autry's collab shoe and ART STATION, his party boy era, and what’s next for this ever-surprising artist.
Hey Rob! So, you're about to celebrate your collaboration with Autry in Miami, and your silver tires will be exhibited at the event. Could you tell me a bit more about this tire project of yours, and the inspiration behind it?
I love car tires because they really are the symbol of movement, of travel, and of engineering advancement. But they trouble me because they're not recyclable. A tire just will never disappear. It has its useful life, then it goes to the landfill and it doesn't decompose. And so when I initially thought to chrome them, I wanted not necessarily to make a monument of that predicament, but to stop a couple of them from going in the landfill—to put them front and center in a museum or a posh living room.
This also links to the gas station concept for the event overall. What's the message here?
This part is a little less concrete in my mind, but one thing that I will say is that when I was younger and a journalist or a magazine would ask me for a list of artists that really inspired me, the first person I would think of was Robert Isabell—the New York City party planner who had Bianca Jagger ride into Studio 54 on horseback for New Year’s Eve. So I really like showmanship, and I really like theater: sometimes it's a little surreal, sometimes it's just about accelerated glamor. But I think that having a party for the shoes in a service station where all of the surfaces have been chromed, it just has that Robert Isabelle kind of effect.
It’s a callback to your party boy era, I guess?
Yeah, sure! I can think of a 20 year period when I wasn’t home a single night. I was just out having fun and meeting people.
And you’ve always liked to provoke. Has your career moved away from this as you've matured, or is the urge to shock still there?
Provocation is just sort of built into my personal sensibility. I like comics that provoke, and I like film directors like John Waters that provoke. I mean, I don't think that it should be the only tool in your kit. I also like quite simple and pure art, like Agnes Martin’s. But I do like to mix it up.
Before I forget though, I just wanted to add one thing about the shoes. It doesn't fit into this part of our conversation necessarily, but it's a lifelong philosophy of mine that if you don't really have the time to organize a good wardrobe for yourself—maybe all of your clothes are old and crummy—if you have a really nice pair of shoes, it just sets it all off. It makes the crummy clothes look great.
That brings me nicely to what I wanted to ask next. Before I heard you were collabing with Autry, I wouldn’t have pinned you as a sneakerhead. Why are sneakers important to you?
I really like all the shoes I grew up with, they mean a lot to me. And there’s probably a sexual element there too. If I think of my own coming of age and sexual awakening, the boys that I thought were cute at that time in the eighties would've been wearing these classic sneakers.
It seems to me that sneakers are just the shoes of our era. I like the typology of sneakers, the way you can chart them and they change incrementally each year. It's like car design or even toothbrush design. If you look at a toothbrush from 1970 and then a toothbrush from ‘75 and then a toothbrush from today, they always reflect the design moment of the era and the times, and they embrace a lot of unnecessary design changes. They have to change so that when you're walking down the aisle of the supermarket, you grab the next one.
And what was it like going through this design process with Autry?
I felt very respected and very involved. They were willing to make prototypes of every crazy suggestion that I had before we landed on this one. There were many ideas and they were open to all of them. A lot of it just had to do with time constraint and making the most exciting project within a three month window.
But I love the chrome sneaker, the final outcome, because for me it's a nice reference to my Andy Warhol monument that was in Union in New York City a few years ago. So yeah, I was thinking about the Warhol statue, and the tires of course.
You can shop the Autry x Rob Pruitt collab sneaker at the brand's online store here.
