Grand National

Grand National examines American identity through the culture that surrounds the 1980s Buick Grand National, a car produced at the end of Detroit’s industrial peak and during a period defined by economic restructuring, shifting gender expectations, and the political rhetoric of national strength. What began as a fascination with a single model expanded into a study of the people who continue to maintain, repair, and preserve these cars long after their moment of cultural prominence. The project looks closely at how masculine identity circulates through the practices that keep these machines running. The Grand National becomes a vessel for masculine anxiety in the present day, inherited from the era of the car’s production between 1982 and 1987. The politics, economics, and cultural narratives of that period continue to reverberate: fantasies of American exceptionalism, the promise of upward mobility, and the mythology of self-reliance. The commitment to keeping these cars alive reflects a form of resilience forged in the face of loss lof industry, community, and of the certainty that defined earlier generations. Ultimately, Grand National is a portrait of America in flux, a record of how identity persists through touch, repetition, and devotion, and how the act of keeping something running becomes a way of keeping oneself intact.