A native of Protection, Kansas, Stan Herd nourished a love of art as a young man and was awarded an art scholarship to Wichita State University in 1969.
After working in New York for a number of years he returned to his heritage in rural Kansas and began developing a large quantity of artwork including paintings and large murals with mostly western imagery. A few years into his career as an established western artist, Herd had a thought.
“I was on a flight back from Dodge City in 1976 after painting a mural on a bank when I was looking down at a field and saw a tractor traversing a field corner to corner when the idea came to me to create a design on the ground,” he explained. “
Herd’s first Earthwork was of Chief Satanta, a Kiowa leader. It was several years in the making before it was unveiled in 1981. The 160-acre portrait would become the first of many Earthworks.
To date Herd has created about 40 commissioned commercial pieces and 40 art pieces of his own. The commercial works afford him the freedom to do the work that means the most to him.
He has used combines, tractors, Roto tillers, drills, and many hand-held tools combining new and existing vegetation to carve out an image. His work sometimes includes mulch, rocks and stones as well. Herd said he usually has a dozen people assist on an average Earthwork project, sometimes family, friends, locals, students and agriculturists who know the area and its crops.
In 2018 Herd received an email from a tobacco executive in China inviting him to visit Yunnan province and see if he wanted to participate in the construction of a public park. After a bit of consideration and recovering from the surprise of the invitation, Herd jumped at the chance. This would be a four-acre earthwork on a hillside in the center of the 800-acre Taiping Lake Park.
Thus began an epic undertaking that found Herd traveling to China 15 times in 15 months. He insisted on creating the design outline without a GPS – laying every single line by himself.” The work was interrupted by several rainy seasons.
Herd used more than 15,000 bricks chipped out of locally quarried rock. These were placed to create beds for flowering plants and medicinals native to the region. Together the stone and vegetation formed the patterns of the subject’s face and clothing.
Herd’s comment about the finished art: “It beautifully represents the elegance of the (women) of China. … And this artwork also (embodies) communication in culture and art areas between China and America.”
Show above is Stan Herd’s Young Woman of China.
Stan Herd’s most recent project is a 1.2-acre recreation of Van Gogh’s famous artwork, Olive Trees, which he “planted” in Minneapolis. The piece was commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art and involved weeks of mowing, digging, planting, and earthscaping to create the piece viewable from the air near the Minneapolis airport. The field location was specifically chosen so that flight passengers can easily see the land art.
Like many of his artworks, Herd’s rendition of Van Gogh’s painting will disappear over time as the crops grow out and the elements wear down the design.
Young Woman of China might not be big enough to be seen from space, however, it does have one advantage over the Great Wall of China. As Herd explains: “It’s so deep and embedded in the ground, and so massively created on that hillside, it will be here hundreds of years from now.”
Stan Herd has certainly created a niche in the art world. Dan Rather reporting on CBS News called him the Father of Crop Art.
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