We had a chance to stop by Cadillac Ranch, located in Amarillo Texas, during a long roadtrip while moving from Chicago to Phoenix. We stopped in Amarillo to meet some good friends that live there and visited it on our way out.
Standing along Route 66 west of Amarillo, Cadillac Ranch was invented and built by a group of art-hippies imported from San Francisco. They called themselves The Ant Farm, and their silent partner was Amarillo billionaire Stanley Marsh. He wanted a piece of public art that would baffle the locals, and the hippies came up with a tribute to the evolution of the Cadillac tail fin. Ten Caddies were driven into one of Stanley Marsh 3’s fields, then half-buried, nose-down, in the dirt (supposedly at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza). They faced west in a line, from the 1949 Club Sedan to the 1963 Sedan de Ville, their tail fins held high for all to see on the empty Texas panhandle.
That was in 1974. People would stop along the highway, walk out to view the cars and then deface them or rip off pieces as souvenirs. Stanley Marsh and The Ant Farm were tolerant of this public deconstruction of their art — although it doomed the tail fins — and eventually came to encourage it.
While learning about Cadillac Ranch through several websites, I learned that the Cadillacs have now been in the ground as art longer than they were on the road as cars. They are stripped to their battered frames, splattered in day-glo paint splooge, barely recognizable as automobiles.
Yet Cadillac Ranch is more popular than ever. It’s become a ritual site for those who travel through Amarillo, Texas. The smell of spray paint hits you from a hundred yards away; the sound of voices chattering in French, German, and UK English makes this a unique place in an isolated area within Texas.
These are a couple of photos I took while visiting it:
Marco Serrato 
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