Dustin Shuler’s Spider Pelt, a flattened and hinged full-size Fiat Spider autobody.

Artist Dustin Shuler, who calls himself an “urban hunter of cars” has restored his 1985 public art work “Spider Pelt,” a mounted sculpture of a “skinned” red fiat spider. The Moscone Parking Garage exterior wall faces toward Folsom on Third Street near Howard.

The Los Angeles artist has built his artistic career, and an international reputation, on hunting cars, skinning them of their sheet metal exteriors, and arranging them into thin, flat compositions he calls “pelts. “Spider Pelt”-created from a 1971 red fiat spider -was commissioned by the Arts Commission for the Moscone Parking Garage and installed in 1985.

The 150-pound piece, says Shuler, is lighter than his other pelts, which include a 400-pound Mercedes, a Pinto, a Triumph GT6, a Texas pickup truck, and an L.A.P.D. classic, formerly the patrol car that cruised Shuler’s own neighborhood, called “Tiger Pelt.” The Fiat was physically one of the better cars, says Shuler, who selects his prey with care. “I turn down a lot of cars,” he says. “I can tell right away how it will look as a pelt. And I don’t do junk.”

The repainted, rechromed, and reglassed “Spider Pelt was relocated to the garage’s south wall, where it is readily visible to Third Street drivers entering the downtown area.
The metal sections are again connected by lengths of stainless steel cable, which gives the work its pelt-like flexibility while preventing it from flapping. The Plexiglas windows have been replaced with Lexan, a stronger material with UV protective coating. The cabling hangs on 77 fasteners attached to the garage wall.

Dustin Shuler’s “pelts” have been shown in museums throughout the United States and Europe. He has created pelts for public outdoor walls in Chicago, San Jose, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Hamden, Connecticut.

A former steel mill worker and crane operator, he started an art career in the early 1970s. He became particularly well known in 1980, the year of the gas crunch, for a public sculpture “Death of an Era.” It was created on the front lawn of the California State University Cal State Dominguez Hills campus, where Shuler and a crew pinned his 1959 Cadillac into the ground with a two-ton 20-foot nail dropped from 100 feet above. Shuler used the same nail for subsequent works, including “Pinned Butterfly,” a Cessna 150 speared to the side of a Los Angeles hotel.