50 States of Wonder
10 Art Installations That Prove Everything's Bigger in Texas

Hidden in the middle of Baytown’s Downtown Arts District is an art installation of unique proportions. Down this short alley, over 120 multicolored umbrellas float overhead, casting dancing shadows on the ground and alley walls. As you venture down the corridor, umbrellas of every color create a wonderful, whimsical feel. (Read more.)

Not intended to be a destination, this workshop/gallery has turned into one, anyway—a surprising place where one can see something out of the ordinary in the middle of an industrial part of Houston. Giant heads will occasionally sit in the parking lot; huge sculptures of the Beatles and former President George H. W. Bush can be seen from the street. (Read more.)

Outside of the swanky Joule Hotel in downtown Dallas, you can’t help but see a three-story orb resting in the lush garden. It's an enormous, hyperrealistic eyeball—streaky red veins and all. The sculpture stands 30 feet tall, and is modeled after the artist's own baby blues. (Read more.)

It started as a joke. When Grace Ladehoff's West Texan husband, Orville, a farmer, didn’t know what to do with a broken-down old combine, she asked him, “Why don’t you just bury it?

That was the spark that ignited the farmer’s crazy idea: Not to bury, but to “plant” combine harvesters on his two-acre plot of land along Claude Highway just south of Amarillo. Fourteen combines later, Orville had himself a veritable Combine City. (Read more.)

Heading south out of Amarillo on I-27, you might spot two gigantic legs in athletic socks. They're inspired by the shattered likeness of an Egyptian king. "Ozymandias" is the Greek name for Ramesses II, and was the inspiration for and name of a famous poem written in 1818 by the Romantic poet Percy Shelley. 

The sculpture was built by local self-taught artist Lightnin’ McDuff, who specializes in altering found objects to make new pieces of art. The sculpture has been vandalized numerous times, most notably with the addition of socks to the legs. Occasionally the socks are sandblasted off the sculpture, but always seem to reappear. Some locals appear to prefer the king's legs be kept warm. (Read more.)

Built in 1974, Cadillac Ranch is the brainchild of the eccentric helium millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 (he found the Roman numeral III to be pretentious, and replaced it). The cars are positioned nose-down and face west, supposedly at the same angles as some of Egypt's pyramids.

Graffiti is encouraged, and the cars undergo ever-mutating layers of paint. In 2005, the vehicles were given an all-pink makeover in tribute to people with breast cancer, and later painted black and yellow to honor the passing of one of Marsh’s longtime friends. (Read more.)

In a field alongside a small country road stands a replica of Stonehenge, the prehistoric fixture in Wiltshire, England. This 60% scale replica was built by the late Alfred Shepperd, with the help of his friend and neighbor Doug Hill. It represents what the larger, more famous version looked like before weather and erosion toppled some of the original stones. Two years after Stonehenge II was built, a pair of Easter Island moꞌai figures was added to the site. (Read more.)

Aluminum boxes, fluorescent tubes, and salvaged auto bodies are just some of the sculptural media used to create the modern art housed at the Chinati Foundation, a series of art installations on a repurposed military base on the desolate West Texas plains. 

The facility was once a studio for the artist Donald Judd. The complex first opened to the public in 1986, originally providing a permanent home for works by Judd, John Chamberlain, and Dan Flavin. Since then, other artists’ works have followed, and a vibrant artistic community has flourished. The focus of the collection is on large-scale sculptural works made to be inextricable from their surroundings. (Read more.)

During World War II, two German prisoners of war were tasked with an unusual job: painting a mural in Building 98’s officers club. 

Their mural was based on the dusty Texan landscapes they saw around them, but was also partly imaginary. It depicted scenes from Westerns the artists had screened back in Germany (covered wagons, cowboys on horseback, and spiny saguaros abound), despite the fact that these features were nowhere to be found in Marfa. (Read more.)

The middle of the West Texas desert isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a fully stocked Prada store, but stop a few miles outside of the tiny town of Valentine, and you’ll find just that.

Built of a biodegradable, adobe-like substance, the building is meant to slowly melt back into the earth, serving as a surrealist commentary on Western materialism.

Costing a sum total of $80,000—or, put another way, about 40 Prada handbags—Prada Marfa opened on October 1st, 2005. Following a robbery, all of the store’s Prada wares were heavily alarmed and stronger windows were installed. Additionally, the handbags have no bottoms, and all of the shoes are right-footed. (Read more.)