Cadillac Ranch, Ten Cars Buried in a Wheat Field Forever

The story of Cadillac Ranch begins, as many of the best American art stories do, with a list of eccentric millionaires.

In nineteen seventy-two, an experimental architecture and media collective from San Francisco called Ant Farm was looking for someone willing to fund their more ambitious projects. Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels, the three artists at the core of Ant Farm, came across a list that identified wealthy, unconventional individuals who might be open to unusual proposals. One name on that list was Stanley Marsh three. Not the third, the number three, which was itself a statement about the man's relationship to convention.

Marsh was an Amarillo oil heir and wheat farmer with a documented appetite for public spectacle and a deep suspicion of institutional art. He had land. He had money. He was interested. What the Ant Farm collective brought to him was an idea rooted in something they had found in a children's book about the evolution of the automobile.

From roughly nineteen forty-eight to nineteen sixty-three, Cadillac designers had experimented with the tail fin, a chrome aerodynamic flourish that grew from a modest suggestion into a towering architectural statement and then, as tastes changed, shrank back to nothing. Lord and Marquez had become obsessed with that arc of rise and fall. They wanted to document it physically.

Between May first and May seventeenth, nineteen seventy-four, Marsh advertised in the Amarillo Globe-Times for used Cadillacs under the name Leo Wyoming. On June twenty-first, nineteen seventy-four, Marsh threw an opening party for the completed installation: ten Cadillacs from model years nineteen forty-nine through nineteen sixty-three, buried nose-first in a wheat field at the same angle as the Pyramids of Giza, their tail fins pointed at the sky in chronological order.

In nineteen ninety-seven, as Amarillo expanded westward, the cars were pulled out of the ground and reinstalled two miles farther west to maintain their distance from the city. They are still there. They are covered in spray paint, added and removed and added again by visitors who are encouraged to participate. Bring a can if you want to leave something. It won't last, which is the point.