E ditor’s Comments

Expression

“Be sure to take your paint spray cans with you, as the purpose of this monument is to let the audience participate in it. You can simply write down your name, or if you have an inspiring message, leave it on one of the cars for the other visitors to read (or to erase).”

—Official Cadillac Ranch website

Nancy at the Cadillac Ranch, this past summer.

n my countless trips back Cadillac Ranch has inspired other Is there any area of schooling and forth to car-based installations such as Car- where students are better able to over the years, I have wit- henge in Alliance, Nebraska (see express themselves than through Onessed the ever-changing page 24 of this issue), and Cars-on- art? I think not. Yet the spray can artistic expression of the Cadillac a-Spike in Berwyn, Illinois. Maybe approach (throwing paint at a sur- Ranch, an art installation of graf- today’s popular art form of the art face) is not enough. We need to chal- fiti-covered cars just off the highway car is due, at least in part, to the lenge students to express themselves outside Amarillo, . The cars Cadillac Ranch’s example. The auto- through meaningful art problems line the horizon, parallel to I-40 on a mobile is certainly still used as a that encourage both thoughtful and frontage road along the course of old means of personal expression. emotional responses. Who can do Route 66. At Cadillac Ranch, the cars are that better than dedicated art teach- The Cadillac Ranch consists of set back a bit from the highway, but ers? a row of ten Cadillac automobiles you can park along the frontage road (1949–1963) half-buried nose-down and walk through an opening in the at the same angle as the pyramids in fence out to the site. As we parked W e b s i t e s Egypt. Supposedly an homage to the our car this visit, we were surprised www.libertysoftware.be/cml/cadil- American automobile, it was created to see whole families, including lacranch/crmain.htm in 1974 by Stanley Marsh III, a local small children, arming themselves www.carhenge.com eccentric millionaire who owns the with cans of spray paint. We had to www.orangeshow.org/artcar.html land on which it sits, and the Ant dodge over-exuberant spray painters www.artcarparade.com Farm, a San Francisco art collective. adding their own personal expres- According to the Cadillac Ranch sions. Though we certainly appreci- website, the Cadillac was the auto- ated these parents’ support of their mobile of choice for the installation children’s artistic efforts, we found because of its prestige and “radical ourselves considering how we, as art styling idea, the tail fin.” teachers, could better encourage rich Perhaps the first monument to and meaningful artistic expression Nancy Walkup, Editor America’s love of the automobile, in our students.

 SchoolArts March 2008