A fire-breathing dragon made of coat hangers in Pennsylvania. An 82-foot whale built from plastic in the New Mexico desert. A rainbow arch of shipping containers towering over an Australian port suburb. Around the world, artists have taken things we throw away and made them impossible to ignore — and several of these oddities are worth planning a detour around.
The most famous of the lot may be Ethyl the Whale in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At 82 feet long, she holds the Guinness World Record for the largest recycled plastic sculpture, built by San Francisco artists Yustina Salnikova and Joel Stockdill as a warning about plastic pollution. Originally created for California's Monterey Bay Aquarium, she was bought by the art collective Meow Wolf in 2019 and now lives, incongruously, in the desert.
New Mexico seems to attract this kind of thing. Luna County is home to the Frontera Sculpture Oasis, a garden in the Chihuahuan Desert near the U.S.-Mexico border assembled from scavenged bricks and bottles by artist Taras Mychalewych after his car broke down there mid-road-trip. And in Las Cruces, a 20-foot roadrunner built from old shoes, cell phones and bike parts has watched over a scenic rest area since 1993 — artist Olin Calk originally installed it at the local landfill to make a point about consumption.
Elsewhere, the motivations range from quirky to political. In Littlestown, Pennsylvania, tire-center employee Noah Russell turned a parade challenge into a roadside zoo of tire animals, including a prize-winning lion and that fire-breathing dragon. In Palm Springs, California, a 28-foot spider with a Volkswagen Beetle for a body guards a former auto shop. On the edge of Reykjavik, Icelandic filmmaker Hrafn Gunnlaugsson has been adding scrap-metal Vikings, deities and a giant buoy-eyeball to his oceanside property, The Raven's Nest, since 1977.
Some carry sharper messages. The Swimmer, in the Swedish seaside town of Skanör med Falsterbo, is built from nearly 200 discarded beach chairs and parasols collected from nearby shores. In El Alto, Bolivia, a 30-foot Che Guevara statue assembled from engines and cogs depicts the revolutionary with an indigenous face and a bald eagle underfoot — a work that still divides opinion. And in Gijón, Spain, the Árbol de la Sidra, a tree built from cider bottles and lit from within each night, celebrates Asturias' beloved apple cider while nodding to the tree of life.
What links them all is a habit of seeing value where most people see junk — outsider art at its most surprising, and often in places you'd already be passing through. Several sit conveniently on road-trip routes: the Pennsylvania tire animals along Hanover Pike, Schaefer's Auto Art on a quiet road in Erie, the Palm Springs spider just outside town. If your idea of a good holiday includes a bit of the strange, these works of upcycled art make excellent, usually free, stops — and they might just change how you look at your own recycling bin.