Ruthann Godollei is a really good driver. She drives defensively, avoiding fender benders and sideswipes with the sort of Spidey-sense that comes with having created an art car. Maybe you've seen her tooling around in her green 1985 Volvo custom-stenciled with thousands of gears. When the police once pulled her over, she was incredulous, until she learned that they just wanted a photo.

She has 280,000 miles on her car, and not just from commuting to her job as an art professor at Macalester College. Many of those miles have come from driving to various shrines to artistic cars, to art car parades and to cities where she lectures on the phenomenon of taking a perfectly boring car and embellishing it with corks, cameras and Mardi Gras beads.

"It's a way to insert art into daily life," Godollei said. "As artists, we have galleries and other venues, but our cars are open 24 hours a day, and it's free."

Such rolling art is featured in Godollei's new book, "Road Show: Art Cars and the Museum of the Streets" (Speck, $22.95). Co-written with Twin Cities author Eric Dregni, "Road Show" explores the history of vehicular adornment -- gilding the Lincoln, as it were -- from Roman chariots to cupcake cars. (More on those in a bit.)

What Godollei found is that there is "a human impulse to decorate vehicles. I can't locate a culture in the world where a vehicle hasn't been decorated by someone in the culture," she said. The motivation varies. "Some people do it because they're obsessive collectors, and this is a way to show their collections. Others are just exhibitionists at heart. But for many, there's a very real and generous impulse to share."

The top two hotbeds of art cars are Houston and San Francisco -- clement climates, you'll note. How Minnesota became host to the third-largest art car parade in the country each summer is a tribute to the state of local art. (See artcarparade.com/ for future events.) The North Star state also is home to the first and, so far, only art car parade across a frozen lake each winter.

"Minnesota tolerates its artists remarkably well," Godollei said, although noting that local art cars often are more painted and less sculptural than cars in other states, "because we have to be able to brush off the snow."

Godollei has been painting vehicles since she stenciled tiger stripes on her bicycle at age 10, and is on her fifth art car.

Her more conventional printmaking is social commentary about war and homelessness, "so the car is somewhat of a comic relief," she said. "I've met a whole community of commentarians and contrarians around the country, and the world."

In Minnesota, she found turn-of-the-century photos of cars decorated for the Winter Carnival, for the Halloween festival in Anoka and for harvest celebrations.

Today, the artistic instinct can have practical applications, such as the lightweight, high-mileage bamboo cars made by students in Japan.

Then there are the whimsical applications, such as the cupcake cars that originally were built for Burning Man 2004, the annual artsy/music event in the Nevada desert. A cupcake shape of sheet metal, wire, fabric and wood is welded to a solar-charged electric cart. Cool, right? Now the cars are one of the decadent gifts featured in this year's Neiman-Marcus catalog -- for a cool $25,000.

Godollei's '85 Volvo is hardly in that realm, but her mechanic does take special pride in keeping it going.

"He says it has another hundred thousand miles on it," she said. "I know it's made my commute so much more pleasurable. Not a day goes by when someone doesn't say, 'Cool car.'"

Should you be inspired to turn your own car into an art object, Godollei says it's definitely easier, mentally, to start with an older car. "But the timid can also start with a car costume," she said, "what I call a car cozy."

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185