SAIC Alums Design the Trophies for Chicago's NASCAR Street Race

by Caitlin Cooner (MA 2025)

Art and NASCAR are two seemingly unrelated entities.

However, Chicago-based artists Nicole Beck (SAIC 1979-80) and Thomas Lucas (MFA 1995) merge the two through their trophy designs for the NASCAR Chicago Street Race.

The race took place July 1–2 with the track running around Grant Park. Drivers cruised past various Chicago sites including Buckingham Foundation, Soldier Field, and even the Art Institute of Chicago. This being the first ever street race in the NASCAR Cup Series and first NASCAR race in Chicago, it felt appropriate that these Chicago artists took on their first-ever trophy design project. Although Beck and Lucas are new to trophy design, they have a wealth of experience working in metal sculpture.

Beck started her undergraduate degree at SAIC in 1979 and found an early love for sculpture because of the exciting new practices occurring in the School’s studios. “Trophy design is a little out of my wheelhouse,” Beck said, “but I like a challenge and was interested in the scale of this project.” Beck is known for her large-scale metal and glass public art installations throughout Illinois and nationwide, so creating a lighter weight, 30-inch trophy was a welcome project. Beck was also excited about this project because of her familiarity with racing (her brother competes in motorsports) and the opportunity to showcase a different aspect of her artistic practice. She is first and foremost a welder and enjoys the physicality of working with metals and machinery.

Beck subcontracted Chicago’s Vector Custom Fabricating for specific aspects of the mild steel top spiral, and she fabricated the stainless base form in her own shop. Beck wanted to stray from traditional trophy design and create something more abstract that captured the aerodynamics of car racing as well as the perimeter and spray of the Buckingham Fountain. Beck also hand-painted the trophy red and blue to reference the Chicago flag.

Lucas is a self-proclaimed motorhead. He grew up in a family that worked on cars and enjoyed watching drag racing. This is why he felt drawn to printmaking early in his career; the use of machinery, physicality of the process, and scientific aspects of the medium made sense to him.

Lucas’s time at SAIC was mostly spent in the printmaking studios working on the lithography and etching presses. “I realized later how printmaking has become a hub of sort of creative activity and philosophical creative activity; as steps to a result, parts to a whole, it’s like an engine is built,” Lucas said. A student and collaborator of Chicago sculptor Richard Hunt (BFA 1957, HON 1979), Lucas has experimented with all different processes of printmaking from works on paper to prints on clay, glass, and metal. Working with Eric Stevenson from Lunarburns Studios, Lucas created a trophy design that required a screen-printing process to etch onto cast bronze. Lucas’s design consists of a base and a curved, wedge-like top with a shape meant to evoke the energy and speed of car racing. Lucas etched the NASCAR logos onto the wedge as well as the Chicago skyline, transforming the piece of metal into a work of art.

Growing up around racing, Lucas noticed the lack of representation. As he learned more about the history of the sport and started working on this project, he asked, “What happens if there was more Blackness in Nascar. What happens if it [there] was more Black advertising in NASCAR?” Although representation has increased in NASCAR in the past few years with the success of racers like Bubba Wallace, Lucas hopes that NASCAR will continue to diversify.

Both Beck and Lucas’s innovative take on the ever-familiar trophy design represents a rare unification of sports and the arts. And in many ways, creating these trophies is similar to building racing cars: both require metal and machines, both involve trial and error, and both hope to evoke the spirit of victory.

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