Downtown’s Half-Buried Limo Sculpture Has Been Removed So They Can Build That Yotel

July 27, 2016

Photo by Sean McCaughan originally for Curbed Miami.

A Lincoln Town Car-style limousine sticking bow-up out of the dirt in an empty lot in Downtown Miami that looked like the freakish carnage of one hell of a prom night but was actually temporary public art has been removed. The Next Miami was apparently the first to notice. The car will eventually be replaced by a Yotel Hotel that has been planned for the site for at least a year, even though no permits for the Yotel have actually been taken out yet.

This is how the Limo’s artist Nate Page described his work when first installed:

Known for architectural scale interventions that unsettle the functionality of quotidian infrastructure Los Angeles based artist Nate Page will create a dramatic temporary intervention into the urban fabric of Miami’s downtown in response to the burgeoning skyline and rapid pace of development by partially burying a white limousine in the ground with its front fender facing the sky. Engaging ideas of luxury and problematizing notions surrounding the American dream, Page questions notions of “high-end” living in light of Miami’s frenetic boom and mythology of excess. Referencing the iconic public 1974 artwork Cadillac Ranch by the art collaborative Ant Farm, Page utilizes another icon, the limousine to specifically address the context of Miami, a city built upon the lure of tourism and luxury. Situating the partially buried limousine in a vacant plot of prime real estate which will soon be transformed into a high rise condominium, the intervention contributes to expectations of success and failure and challenges viewers to consider their context and surroundings.