Madhouse Motors

Can motorcycles be works of art? Well, they are at a place called Madhouse Motors. Jared Bowen of GBH Boston went to see how the mechanics there are creating masterpieces in motion for our arts and culture series, Canvas. It's a r And to bike aficionados, it's Eden. How do you describe this place? What was the coolest place I've ever been? Nick Timney is the manager of Madhouse Motors in Boston. It's a place for tune-ups and repairs, but also much more than that. A place where antique bikes live, where they take on new personas, and where people I would come to the shop at And I would work until 4 in the morning, And I think I kind of proved myself to her, and I became a mechanic at Madhouse. She is Jay Shia, owner of Madhouse Motors and sculptor of motorcycles. Yeah, so there's a lot of parts on both these bikes that are abnormal. Everything from where you put your feet on these to the taillights. Tail light on this is an egg slicer. It functions. It has a purpose, instead of it just being there for aesthetic appeal. Picasso did that a lot. He did, but people don'talk as much about his sculpture work. Shia and her team run the creative arm of Madhouse Motors We want it to be composed properly and be aesthetically beautiful and be able to carry a storyline. Yeah, we view it And if someone calls it art, I think we're all ecstatic about it. How much does a bike tell you what it should be? The whole time. It's Motorcycles are in her blood. An interest Shia inherited from her enthusiast father. And before that, her grandmother, seen here in Lebanon. It's also an interest influenced by her photography studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. I hated working on bikes that show up to school dirty and smell I didn't enjoy it. When I got older, I realized that trained my brain to look at a machine or look at a motorcycle, look at a custom build, and say, all right, this color pallet's off, or this shape is wrong, or what's the point of this? The same way that in art class, we would dissect and digest a piece of work. 13 years ago, she named the shop after her family home. A Madhouse, as she describes it. The community watering hole. And so people from all over the world, all different walks of life, would go there and have meals and decompress and sleep there. If the store is fertile, things will grow. And this place is very fertile. Rami Al-Bashara is the shop's newest member. He arrived from Beirut, where both he and his own bike shop fell victim to the port of Beirut explosion in 2020. The roof of my house came in. My shop was destroyed. It was a very testing time. I've lived in a lot of places where there was war and conflict. And this probably was one of the worst thing of experience. He rebuilt, but with Lebanon's economic collapse, and after a chance meeting with Shia, he moved to the US. In his new Madhouse Motors job, he's losing himself in a wonderland of motorcycles he's never encountered. Muse When this hit the market, nothing was going as smooth, as reliable, and as fast. I know it doesn't look The typeface that works is the one that you can't notice. If you'reading a headline on a newspaper, it's the headline that matters, not the typeface. So then how do you apply that to motorcycles? They got to run. They get to work, and they have a look and feel. Feeling, he says, may be the greatest measure of success. Morecycle is a collection of parts until you get on it, and you start it, and the engine becomes alive, and then it becomes an experience. It's now you are ingrained deep into the function of the motorcycle and what feeling it will instill in you. So it's here in this madhouse that ideas rev to fruition, where a saxophone can play the exhaust, and where new beginnings are head for man and machine. For the PBS NewsHour, I'm Jared Bowen in Boston, Massachusetts. What a great story.