UChicago Trivia: What year, make, and model of car is currently encased in concrete inside the Campus North parking garage?

Answer:

c) 1957 Cadillac DeVille

The Campus North parking garage is home to one of the Smart Museum of Art's prized sculptures, a 1970 creation by German artist Wolf Vostell. Vostell's bizarre car art started as a form of performative protest in 1969 when he encased his own car in concrete in a public parking space in front of the Art Intermedia gallery. He did this while the car was running and the radio was still playing. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago heard about this stunt and invited Vostell to do the same in Chicago's River North area in 1970. The work was called "Concrete Traffic."

A few months later, Vostell and the MCA gifted the concrete car to the University of Chicago, where it lived in an outdoor lot for forty years. Eventually, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts was built on that spot, and Concrete Traffic was moved to a warehouse. After years of painstaking restoration, it landed in its current home in the Campus North parking garage, where drivers can continue to be mystified by this strange creation.