Ed “Big Daddy”
Roth.

About the Artist

He invented a visual language that Los Angeles gave to the world.

Ed “Big Daddy” Roth was born in Beverly Hills in 1932 and grew up in Southern California at the exact moment when the car, the teenager, and American popular culture were colliding into something entirely new. He created Rat Fink — a smelly, grotesque, fly-surrounded rodent who became one of the most recognized characters in postwar American iconography — and designed the Beatnik Bandit, a custom car that Revell adapted into a 1/25th-scale model kit and sold to a generation of kids who would grow up to become artists, designers, and collectors.

Roth was also, for a time, living in his vehicle. When Revell began distributing his designs and asked him to make public appearances at car shows and swap meets, he purchased a tuxedo, tails, and a top hat from Goodwill and wore them over everything. He was not performing irony. He was dressing for the occasion he thought the work deserved. He died in 2001, a foundational figure in what came to be called Kustom Kulture — an aesthetic tradition that runs from 1950s California through tattoo art, hot rod illustration, skateboard graphics, and lowbrow painting to the present.

Tom Christopher grew up in Los Angeles, immersed in the hot rod and skateboard culture that Roth helped shape. That influence is visible in Christopher’s own work — the gestural energy, the vernacular imagery, the refusal to choose between high and low. Lift Trucks has on display Roth’s helmet, his decals, and his business card. Objects that belonged to him. Small things that hold a large story.

“He was working with airbrush, fiberglass, and sheet metal while the art world was still debating whether Pop Art was serious.”

LIFT TRUCKS ART