- [Narrator] Support provided by the Amarillo Area Foundation and the Dr. Kent Roberts and Ilene Roberts Balliett Foundation.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] In the vast open plains of the Texas Panhandle, where the horizon stretches endlessly, a unique form of artistic expression has taken root.

No matter where you're from, when you think of public art, Amarillo, Texas inevitably comes to mind.

It is here in 1974 that the world famous Cadillac Ranch was installed, capturing the imagination and curiosity of travelers along I-40 and Route 66 for half a century.

But Cadillac Ranch is just the beginning of this story.

What other works, artists, and collectives have woven their creative threads into the rich tapestry of art in the Texas Panhandle?

(upbeat music) Why has this region become a fertile ground for such unique artworks?

Is it the rugged geology, the isolation of the landscape, or its historic position as a midway point on the Mother Road?

In truth, it is a combination of all these elements.

Join us as we embark on a journey through time and space, uncovering the most successful and enduring public art that has come to define the Texas Panhandle, in this PBS documentary, "In Open Air."

(upbeat music) 20 miles southeast of Amarillo, a breathtaking and unexpected vista unfolds, the High Plains give way.

And in an instant you are transported back in time to the second largest canyon in the United States, Texas State Park, Palo Duro Canyon.

Palo Duro is the Texas Panhandle's original masterpiece.

This sprawling 120-mile long canyon, the result of millions of years of meticulous water erosion, stands as a testament to nature's artistry.

The vibrant hues of the canyon walls, coupled with the unique landscapes, including hoodoos, showcase nature's unpredictable, yet majestic beauty.

- If you go to the Grand Canyon, for example, everything is so far away from you.

There's not the range of colors you get in Palo Duro Canyon and they talk about painted desert and petrified forest and all that stuff.

We have all of that here, and I think the clay is prettier here than it is at petrified forest or painted desert.

And I just love it.

I paint the storms, man.

You've never seen anything cooler than a storm come in over the canyon and the sunlight will battle cloud shadows for a while.

Then all of a sudden the thunder starts rumbling.

You can hear it from 10 miles off just rolling on the canyon rim.

We got that red o-ange clay that you really don't see it that bright anywhere else.

And so Georgia O'Keeffe had had a group of college kids that would paint in the canyon.

They named themselves the Palo Duro Plein Air Painters and they even had a tent down there just below where the interpretive center is for them to stay overnight so they could paint all day.

And so I'm part of a group now called the Palo Duro Plein Air Painters.

And we meet the first Monday of every month and paint down in the state park.

- [Narrator] In the early 20th century, a young artist named Georgia O'Keeffe found herself captivated by the rugged beauty of the Texas Panhandle.

The vast open landscapes of Palo Duro Canyon and the surrounding areas of Amarillo became her muse, inspiring a series of works that would come to define her career.

O'Keeffe first visited Palo Duro Canyon in the summer of 1912.

The Canyon, often referred to as the Grand Canyon of Texas, offered a stark contrast to the bustling urban life she had known.

(horns blowing) Here, amidst the towering cliffs and lonely wind, she found a sense of solitude and freedom that resonated deeply within her.

(warm music) The bright colors of the canyon walls, the interplay of light and shadow, and the endless horizon all found their way onto her canvases.

Her paintings from this period are characterized by bold colors and abstract forms, capturing the essence of the landscape rather than its literal appearance.

- So she came here because she needed a teaching job.

She came here twice, once in Amarillo in 1912 to '14, taught in the brand new Amarillo school district, and then came back to teach at what was West Texas State Normal, which is now West Texas A&M.

And when she was here, she was working full-time as an educator, but also taking her students on walks to see the space.

And then after work she would do watercolor painting, right?

She wasn't doing a ton of oils, very few.

The one in the Panhandle-Plains is in oil, but she was sort of working through that medium.

But what she would do is do drawings and charcoals and watercolors to kind of try to make sense of the shapes and spaces.

And she's an abstractionist.

So she would struggle to see a shape in the world and then make her art here.

And so one of the things that she was really inspired by is the Palo Duro Canyon and that landscape of like color and aridity and almost like the painted desert palette.

And I really think that when she was trying to find a place to resettle later in her life, she found Ghost Ranch, and Abiqui area to be very reminiscent of that kind of western beauty that she first discovered here.

I also think that she continued to paint things like the plains.

She painted it after she left in 1918.

She painted it in 1955.

She kept coming back to that idea of the plains, but a lot of it was sound memories or color memories rather than painting your typical flat landscape, big sky, cowboy, like that's not what she was doing.

She painted one that was a sound memory of cattle being put on the rail cars and the calves like lowing and how sad that sound was.

And the whole thing is about a sound memory.

So it's a very complicated question.

But I think she discovered the west.

She had never been to the west before she came here.

She fell in love with the west and she resettled after her husband passed away in a western landscape.

And I think it was all based on her experience of falling in love with it here.

(western music) (soft music) - Robert Smithson was a land artist.

He is very famous for his earth artwork called The Spiral Jetty, which is in the Great Salt Lake.

But he came to Amarillo in 1973 to work on a project that he eventually called Amarillo Ramp.

Amarillo Ramp is what we would consider the third mature land artwork by Robert Smithson.

There is some debate about Amarillo Ramp in terms of should it be preserved 'cause if you see it in its current state, it's eroded a lot from what it looked like.

It's changed a lot.

He would be okay with it eroding, but he also would be okay with people not necessarily fully restoring, but at least not letting the trees take over and fall apart and things like this.

(soft bright music) - [Narrator] In the annals of American art, few projects are as evocative and enigmatic as Robert Smithson's Amarillo Ramp.

This monumental earthwork nestled in the remote expanses of the Texas Panhandle is a testament to the artist's vision of entropy and the impermanence of human endeavor.

The story begins in the early 1970s, a period marked by Smithson's fascination with the concept of entropy, the natural tendency of systems to move towards disorder.

Smithson already renowned for his Spiral Jetty in Utah, sought to create another earthwork that would embody this idea.

He chose the barren, windswept Plains near Amarillo, Texas as his canvas, a place where the land itself seemed to stretch into infinity, untouched and unspoiled.

Tragically, Smithson's life was cut short in a plane crash on July 20th, 1973, while surveying the site for the Amarillo Ramp.

His untimely death cast a shadow over the project, but his vision was not lost.

With the help of his widow, the artist Nancy Holt, and artist friends Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi, the ramp was completed posthumously in 1973.

Constructed from local earth and rocks, The Amarillo Ramp slopes upward in a gentle curve, blending seamlessly into the landscape.

Its materials, earth, stone, and gravel, were deliberately chosen to reflect the natural environment, emphasizing the connection between art and nature.

The ramp's location, hidden away on private land, adds to its mystique, making it accessible only to those who seek it out with determination.

Over the past 51 years, the forces of nature have taken their toll, wind, rain, and the relentless Texas sun have eroded the structure, causing it to crumble and decay.

Yet this gradual disintegration is precisely what Smithson intended, a physical manifestation of entropy.

A reminder that all human creations are ultimately fleeting.

- Smithson was brought here in the seventies, and it was this moment when earth art was really being embraced by the art community to kind of get outside of the art museum and kind of like the stodgy urban setting.

And to get out in the land and make a piece that was journey-oriented, experience-oriented, you had to go to it and it was hard to get to.

And so I think that that's kind of what he was interested in in other works.

And then having the land and the patronage of Stanley Marsh 3 allowed him to come here and to build his final work of art.

(warm music) There's earth art and land art.

Earth art actually uses the earth itself as the medium or material.

So with something like Robert Smithson, he was using like industrial equipment to move earth or dirt in a way that then shaped into a large-scale sculpture outside in the landscape.

But other artists, like his wife, Nancy Holt, is more of a land artist.

And she will use, say, concrete structures out in the land, but she's not actually sculpting with the earth itself.

But I think both of them have this tendency to want to get outside, not be inside of a museum, to have the viewer when they experience the work of art, be not just, I mean, 'cause on The Amarillo Ramp, you walk on it, like you experience it by being in it, but it's not just the sculpture, it's the environment, it's the fact that a cow might walk by, it's the air, it's the fact that the air changes.

It's the fact that with Spiral Jetty, it was exposed and then went under the water for a while and then reemerged covered in salt crystals, right?

So it's this idea that the earth itself is going to do what it does and the sculpture kind of shapes that and the viewer experience all that.

But it's not controlled in the same way as like a sculpture that then goes into a museum and then is behind a rope and is preserved that way.

(warm music) So his Spiral Jetty, he was always interested in forms that kind of mimic deep time forms, right?

Like a spiral of time kind of gets at deep geological development.

Now, when he did The Amarillo Ramp, he didn't do a spiral, he did a kind of open circle, but it also elevated, what does a ramp do?

It goes up.

So you start low and you go around and you elevate and the land, because it's out in kind of like a grasslands, but sort of craggy, And then you see some mesas in the distance, your eyes change as you move through it and you see the land that way.

So that was his conception.

He had staked out exactly where he wanted it.

He did it in what was a kind of, it wasn't a playa lake, it was a manmade lake, but at the time it had water.

And so he was out there kind of putting the stakes out in this kind of like water-filled landscape that they knew was going to have an earthen ramp built into it.

And so one day he went up in a plane and he went, took a photographer and I think Stanley Marsh went up with him with his family that day.

And they were looking at it from the air, because how else to understand the holistic thing?

And this goes to my like aviation aesthetics idea.

So you gotta get above it.

The second day, same plane, it was just Smithson, the photographer, and the pilot.

And that area, as I understand it, has very weird air currents based on the Canadian River.

Lots of pilots will describe how - and other pilots have died in that area too, like Bivins, right?

Julian Bivins died in the same way where they were flying a plane and the plane kind of, they dipped and it stalled out and it crashed into the ground and all three were killed on impact.

So they kind of came out to honor Smithson and actually see it through and this was a month later, but it was an incredibly tragic sudden thing.

Nancy Holt, this was her life partner.

She had to grieve over the loss and at the same time honor his legacy by building it.

I mean, the whole thing is just really affecting to talk about, but it is nice that it was seen through, because now we have this footprint of importantly in our artists, earth artists in our area.

And they could have all just walked away from it and they didn't.

And so I think it has these layers of meaning for, I don't know - anybody who goes out there.

And at first you see it and you say, "Well that's small and stupid.

It just doesn't really resonate."

You see it from a top of a hill and it kind of looks tiny, but you get out there and it fits your body well.

And then you experience the landscape.

We've taken students, Jon Revett and I, team teach with them.

We've taken students out there who were not art students.

And at first they were like, "This is silly."

But also they enjoyed the journey.

You bump along, it's off road, you have to open a cattle guard gate or something to get in there.

And then they were all like, they didn't wanna leave, right?

So it just means something so much more than just, oh, there's a sculpture, it's Earth.

It's not - it's so much more.

(car starting) - There are 10 cars and the progression is from a 1949 to a 1964 and it's the evolution of the tail fin.

Responsibilities were not to shepherd the Ant Farm around, but certainly they were around a lot.

And everybody was aware of what was going on.

They moved into Toad Hall and went to work traveling around the Panhandle, collecting 10 Cadillacs, traveling around with a pocketful of money and a big idea.

So I do believe that the Cadillac Ranch is an icon of American art and exists in this space that's kind of between participatory experiential art and say land art like what Robert Smithson was doing and others have done in the land, lightning fields for instance.

But I think that Amarillo being at the center of Route 66 and having this wide open plain, where you could see these Cadillacs and approach them from a distance when they appear small, but when you actually get there you realize how large these cars are and that's just a half of it that's sticking out of the ground.

So that experience of place and what it was initially designed to be, these architects put it in the ground as a celebration of the changing tail fin.

That's not what it is anymore.

It's now become this thing where everyone is out there, there's paint everywhere, everyone's leaving their mark, but it's so temporary because right behind you are the next million people that are gonna leave that mark over yours.

(warm music) - So whether you call it entropy art or decay art, it's art that you recognize is not hermetically sealed and unchanging.

No art is, we all know, right?

Our bodies aren't, we all know that it will experience decay, but I think artists like say the Ant Farm have been interested in the fact that they're taking a junked car and creating a sculpture where even the junk car might drive, but now it doesn't because it's half buried in the ground and then it's not sealed up in a building.

It's left in a field for people to experience it.

And sometimes they trash it and sometimes they love it and sometimes they write their name on it, right?

So it's this idea of art being about interaction with the public, that's where performance art comes in, viewer experience.

But when you open it up to the public, it's like the tragedy of the commons.

People are going to do what they're going to do.

And the fact that Ant Farm right now, I mean the Cadillac Ranch right now is a ditch because there's so many people going out there that once it rains, it's underwater like a lake.

And they never foresaw that.

But they didn't make plans beyond, "Hey, wouldn't it be funny to do these cars?"

And then what's as important about the cars is that they came back every 10 years and had a party and reinvented the cars.

And then the cars are now these graffiti type interactive things.

And yeah, I mean, but the trash out there is as much the part of the art too, whether we like it or not, because it's - like the idea of it is decaying, but so is Route 66, so is Americana.

Ed Ruscha did that project on gas stations along Route 66 and he took these photographs of gas stations in this moment that are very deadpan, right?

But they've changed over time.

But he also was interested in kind of coming back to old monuments and showing the dilapidation.

I think that there's a lot of that with the kinds of artists that have come through here, that they're fascinated with that idea that art doesn't just stay put.

Art should be interacted with.

Ed Ruscha even does art about burning gas stations or burning LACMA down, which returns us all the way back to the Dynamite Museum, right?

Is the museum the only way to experience art?

Well, maybe the museum is the false one because we can't protect the art from the decay anyway, even though we try, right?

So this layering of meaning in art that has to do with entropy or decay I think is so important to this area.

I think even I call the Amarillo the decay art capital of the world.

I mean, it's sort of tongue in cheek.

I have no authority to say that, but I think that there might be something here that's really unique about the embrace of decay in this area for the aesthetics.

(warm music) - I'm not super pleased with the state it's in.

I think it's, it's pretty depressing when I go out there because I know what it's supposed to be and it's just in really bad shape.

I really enjoy the pomp and circumstance around it.

I like the people are having a good time and spray painting, but it's in bad shape.

I mean, so had conversations about what to do to preserve it and Chip Lord's like we didn't really even think about that.

We were just so stoked to get those cars in the ground and that was the most impressive part.

And I think what's really interesting about Cadillac Ranch specifically is that it's kind of taken on a life of its own, meaning they didn't intend for it to become the phenomena that it is.

I think they did a study, and I've heard mixed numbers, but we're gonna say over a million people a year get out of their cars and go to Cadillac Ranch, which is an enormous amount of viewership.

(cars rumbling) (bright music) - The Ant Farm is an arts collective.

So they were trained as architects, but they were not traditional architects, right?

Like they would make, what did they call, inflatable buildings out in the middle of nowhere in California where it was just like a balloon and they would go live in it for a while, right?

So they're very off the beaten path.

That's why they call themselves Ant Farm because they wanted to be underground, right?

So underground, counterculture type.

Chip Lord is the one that's still kind of like fielding a little bit of the Ant Farm's legacy.

He just came here for the 50th anniversary of Cadillac Ranch.

So he's been in Amarillo a good number of times, but he's a jokester, they all were.

If you had a Cadillac, you had been successful, right?

It's like the achievement of being an American is to own a Cadillac.

But then they kind of foresaw that this was something that might have a little falseness to it.

So the idea of making the Cadillacs into a kind of graveyard, almost, like burying them.

But then they also wanted to tell the rise and fall of the tail fin story.

So there's 10 Cadillacs, the earliest ones have very minimal tail fin, the middle ones have larger tail fin.

And so they were really responding to kind of like media advertisements.

So this is where pop art comes in, right?

So they're building art based on media, building art based on junk, right?

The Cadillacs were junked when they put them in there.

Ant Farm did so much more than just put these cars in the ground, right?

They were these postmodernist architect artists that you can teach postmodernism through their work.

They were doing media blitzes, like fake news stories.

They reenacted the Kennedy assassination.

And their point there was that they called it the Eternal Frame, right?

We experienced trauma through the television or through, now, the internet over and over and over, right?

So they're very, very smart about what it means to live in the world and to be invested in kind of a media culture and also to kind of have fun with it.

Like they're not super, super serious conceptual artists like Smithson, Smithson was like a philosophical artist.

The Ant Farm were fun, they were like jokesters.

- We had fun doing it, it's still fun.

- [Reporter] What's art?

- Anything.

There's only two kinds of art, bad art and good art.

And if you decide it's art, it's good art.

It worked out good.

And this was the idea that we proposed to him.

And he said, "That sounds like a good thing."

So we came and met Stanley and it just went from there.

Stanley said, "Sure."

Not too often that a patron says, "Oh yeah, just do this."

- [Reporter] And so has the message changed at all?

- No.

What is the message?

- Have fun, there's no message.

It's too pretentious for people to sit around and talk about what this means.

If you like it, that's it, well, it worked and then that's the message.

But you could ask two of my other two partners, Chip Lord and Doug Michels about it.

And they'll tell you something.

They'll really give you some, they'll really lie to you.

They'll tell you any lie you want to hear.

- And we started building with a backhoe to dig, I think the hole as the ground is real hard here.

So when you dig with a backhoe, you get a very precise hole in terms of depth and width.

And so putting cars in, and finally we found a '57, it only took five days to install it.

That was, I think June, right around the same time in 1974.

- [Reporter] Okay, it's chronological in terms of years.

Is that what that is?

I'm sorry.

- Every different tail fin model represented, but it's not every year.

So it begins with '49, '52, '54, '56, '57, '58, '59 'cause at that point, the design changed every year.

And then '60, '62 and '64.

I think there was a point where we knew it was a significant work, right?

But we did it, but we had no idea it was gonna kind of achieve this status and that we'd be back here in 20 years to celebrate the anniversary.

What, - Do you think that the message changes?

Or do you think this is timeless?

- I think it's timeless.

And I think it's only become more popular with time.

It's gone from an avant-garde work of art to an American icon.

And that's quite powerful when something like that happens from a work of art we created.

And that's something beyond our control because the culture chooses its own icons.

It was anointed as an icon by the American people.

(wind blowing) - Yeah, over the course of 50 years, I don't think it's Cadillac Ranch anymore.

It's something else, I don't know what to call it.

(can spraying) - [Narrator] Born from a spark of imagination, Cadillac Ranch evolved into one of America's most iconic roadside attractions.

Against the backdrop of the expansive Texas sky, it stands as a testament to human creativity and the transformative power of art.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Support provided by the Amarillo Area Foundation and the Dr. Kent Roberts and Ilene Roberts Balliett Foundation.