Representational crop art by Stan Herd
Born into a family of a Kansas farmer, American Crop artist Stan Herd graduated from Wichita State University. He is famous for his crop art – a method of creating images by digging, disking, plowing and otherwise manipulating acres of green space. Meanwhile, the themes of his land art – people, landscapes and brands. World famous, Stan Herd is the preeminent representational earthworks artist. In fact, Herd has created his beautiful earthworks projects around the world. And in particular, in England, Cuba, Australia and the United States.

The ‘Saginaw Grant Portrait‘, created to bring attention to issues of importance to Indian activists seeking redress from the loss of tribal sovereignty and poverty on many reservations. The portrait inspired after seeing Saginaw Grant dance at the Haskell University Spring Pow Wow. The earthwork created on thirty-acres from wheat stubble on a farm north of Lawrence, KS in 1988. Used a mower, a disc, and a two-bladed tractor ‘like different pencils’ to give the image its complexity. Photo by Jon Blumb

‘Little Girl in the Wind’ – a four-acre earthwork created near Salina, Kansas and Stan’s first attempt at creating an earthwork without plowing the ground. Instead, the ground was burned, mowed and hand planted with native plants. The portrait is of subject, Carole Cadue, a Kansas Kickapoo woman and the first in a planned series of portraits of indigenous women in their homelands.

Aldo Leopold. In collaboration with the Land Institute in Salina, Kan., to help promote the Summer Prairie Festival in 1998. Stan created a portrait of America’s great conservationist, Aldo Leopold. An environmentalist whose early insight led to the concept of using ‘nature as measure’. In particular, letting the prairie set the standard for an effort to make agriculture mimic the native prairie. In fact, a natural system agriculture. The portrait created in a meek and drought-ridden stand of alfalfa near an overlook on the edge of the farmstead. Eugene Friesen, cellist with the Paul Winter Consort serenaded the gathered crowd with a ‘grasslands’ musical’ offering an accompaniment of readings by Leopold’s children of their father’s writing.
Photo by Jon Blumb

“Earthwork”, award-winning film at more than 50 film festivals in the United States alone and filmed on location in Lawrence and New York City. It tells the true story of Herd’s transformation of a large, trash-strewn, barren lot near a graffiti-laced underground railway tunnel. Meanwhile, inhabited with the homeless into his work entitled Countryside.

Representational crop art by Stan Herd