In 2004 photographer and performer Liz Cohen (BFA '96) walked into Elwood Body Works, an auto body shop in Scottsdale, Arizona, and asked if she could use a corner of the garage to build a car as an art project. The guys working there laughed. Not only did Cohen have limited mechanical skills, but the car she wanted to build was a crazy lowrider cross between an East German Trabant and a Chevy El Camino. And besides, an art project? But Cohen persisted, the laughs died down, and an agreement—rent-free—was struck. "They thought I would last two months," Cohen says.

Four years later, the Trabantimino, as Cohen calls the car, is nearly complete. She has worked fulltime—an average of forty hours a week—building it. Learning from Elwood mechanics as she went, Cohen replaced the engine, installed hydraulics, and made a telescoping driveshaft so the diminutive Trabant can stretch six feet to the El Camino's muscle-car proportions. Meanwhile, Cohen also transformed her own body to better resemble the voluptuous bikini models who "represent" lowrider cars in competitions. "I'm interested in one thing becoming another, and the distance traveled," she says.

Cohen conceived BODYWORK as a way to be part of an art project, not just the maker of the project. She already had spent several years photographing transgendered sex workers along the Panama Canal, growing close to her subjects and occasionally dressing up alongside them. Yet there were obvious limits to how much a part of that project Cohen could be.

It wasn't until she attended a lowrider car show in Fresno, Calif.,  that she found what she was looking for. The flamboyant cars, with their re-imagined bodies and engines, weren't unlike Cohen's previous subjects. "The cars were absolutely beautiful, with narrative murals on them about people's lives, politics, their fantasies," she says. The cars also answered Cohen's wish to "work on something that was really exotic to me, something that’s part of a culture that I don't fit into," she says.

Through large-scale photographs and performances, Cohen has exhibited BODYWORK as an installation-in-progress in Paris, Stockholm, and Scottsdale, and the Museum School recently recognized her work with an Alumni Traveling Scholars Award. Yet Cohen's ultimate goal is to reach beyond the art world. "As artists we have an appreciation for process; it's part of our dialogue," she says. "But it's not part of the lowrider culture. Those guys would roll their eyes." So the real show begins this fall, when Cohen enters the soon-to-be-completed Trabantimino—and herself—in lowrider competitions across the southwest.

Then, with the Traveling Scholars Award funding, Cohen plans to go to Germany, where she'll research East German design and create posters and pin-up calendars to sell at lowrider shows. And she hopes to take her car on a little drive through the Brandenburg Gate, morphing from Trabant to El Camino along the way.