Cadillac Ranch

Built in 1974

Ant Farm, a San Francisco design collective, made Cadillac Ranch for Stanley Marsh 3, an Amarillo millionaire who funded a long run of deliberately odd public works on his land. The three members responsible were Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels.

They bought ten Cadillacs covering model years 1949 to 1963, a span chosen because it runs from the first Cadillac tailfin to the last of the extravagant ones, and buried them nose-first in a wheat field along Route 66. The burial angle is 52 degrees, which is the inclination of the sides of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Moved, and repainted continuously

In 1997, Amarillo had grown far enough west that the installation was in the path of the city. The cars were dug up and reburied in a field two exits along, on other land Marsh owned, in the same configuration. It is the only major land artwork of its era to have been relocated intact.

Painting the cars was not part of the original piece. It started as vandalism, was tolerated, and is now the thing people come for, with the surface repainted so continuously that the layers are inches thick and flake off in sheets. The cars underneath have been stripped to shells.

Nobody removes the paint. The work now consists mostly of paint.

Free, open at any hour, and reached by a gate and a short dirt path from a frontage road pull-off on the south side of I-40 west of Amarillo. There are no facilities, no lighting, and no staff.

Bring spray paint if you want to add to it. Vendors sometimes sell cans at the gate and sometimes do not, so buying in town is more reliable. Leaving empty cans in the field is the one thing that causes friction here, and there are trash cans at the gate.

The field is working pasture and is often muddy. Wind across the Panhandle is constant and will put your paint on you as well as the car, so it pays to stand upwind. Sunrise and sunset are when the site photographs well and when the crowds are thinnest.