About Sean Guerrero

As a kid, I was endlessly captivated by the cars of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Their bold shapes and gleaming designs gave each one a distinct personality, almost like they had souls of their own. I never dreamed that one day I’d earn my living from them—by taking sections of their brilliant chrome bumpers, reshaping and welding those pieces into larger-than-life sculptures that capture and preserve their enduring spirit.

Sure, some of these classic cars have been lovingly restored and now live on in private collections. But what about the forgotten ones we spot far off in distant fields as we drive by? The abandoned loners that have sat rusting in the dirt for decades, enduring blistering heat and bitter cold? Their windshields are shattered, their bodies riddled with bullet holes. What becomes of them? Over time, most will be rounded up, crushed in a mobile compactor, chopped apart, and shipped overseas to be melted down. Whatever essence they once held—what they represented in their prime—vanishes. Their remains are reborn as a cheap wrench at the hardware store, only to snap the first time it’s used and be tossed aside. To me, that feels like a tragically undignified end for such magnificent machines.

When I’m out there alone among my latest discoveries, cutting the bumpers from these old iron beasts, I often wonder about the stories they could tell from their glory days. I picture them rolling off the lot on day one—shiny, powerful, brand-new—purchased by someone who had saved and sacrificed for months to claim that dream car. As my torch slices through the metal, I might hear a dog barking in the distance, a train rumbling past, or the wind howling across the open land. But the cars themselves remain silent sentinels: some standing solitary, others gathered in quiet clusters. In my mind, they resemble ancient buffalo that never fully returned to the earth—great herds of steel buffalo: Pontiacs, Chryslers, Chevys, Buicks—once roaming the vast prairies of concrete and asphalt.

Am I just another scavenger, picking over their bones to drag them off to some modern equivalent of the glue factory? Or, by reimagining them—giving them new life and dignity through welded sculptures that still carry recognizable fragments of their original form—do I become a kind of preservationist? I firmly believe it’s the latter. Whether I’m crafting a 14-foot rearing stallion or an imposing knight astride his horse, each piece I’ve created over the years feels like a monument to their strength, style, and quiet nobility. Through reinterpretation, I honor what they once were, ensuring their spirit endures long after the fields have claimed their bodies.