Cadillac Ranch graffiti car art Amarillo
— the colour the spray cans leave behind.
Not only on a wall.
Cadillac Ranch graffiti car art Amarillo, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Ten Cadillacs planted nose-down in a Panhandle wheat field, tail fins pointed at the Texas sky. Visitors come with rattle-cans and a few minutes of shade. The paint goes on in layers; when the layers grow thick the cars are sandblasted to bare metal and the colour starts over the next afternoon. The cars wear every shade anyone has thought to bring them.
The place, in three passes.
Cadillac Ranch sits along the south frontage of Interstate 40, about ten miles west of downtown Amarillo on what was Route 66. The installation is ten Cadillacs, model years 1949 through 1963, buried hood-down at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was built in 1974 by the San Francisco art collective Ant Farm — Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, and Doug Michels — and funded by the Amarillo oil and helium heir Stanley Marsh 3. In 1997 the line of cars was moved two miles west to keep clear of the city's growing edge.
The colour at Cadillac Ranch is not the paint, it is the geology of paint. Layers from every visitor build up on the steel until a panel can carry a coating thicker than a quarter. The caretakers periodically have the cars sandblasted back to bare metal — often ahead of a memorial repaint for a friend of the work, like the all-pink day that followed Stanley Marsh 3's death in 2014. By the next afternoon the layering has begun again, a chord of pinks, lime greens, and the silver-grey of fresh primer.
The site is open daylight to dusk and admission is free. A gravel pull-off on the I-40 south frontage road serves as parking; visitors walk through a turnstile gate and across roughly a third of a mile of pasture to reach the line of cars. Bring a can of spray paint — it is part of the work, and the one rule from the caretakers is to paint the cars, not the ground or the gate. The wind off the Panhandle is constant, so cans drift sideways; close-range painting only.
