New Perspectives on the Prairie

The Earthworks of Stan Herd

Long before drones or Google's eye-in-the-sky perspectives, a young man from southwest Kansas looked out from a small plane and saw a brand new world. His hometown, his family's farm, everything below suddenly became art.

Years later, the up-and-coming painter and muralist met a bunch of young researchers on a piece of land near Salina to talk about prairie and art and history and Native Americans and community. Having successfully completed a few earthworks — land art to be viewed from above — he wondered about making a piece that could last the way the prairie lasts and wouldn't require plowing and tilling to create. He was looking to researchers at The Land Institute, opens a new window for their ideas. 

As you may have guessed, the artist was Stan Herd. Perhaps remembering Wes Jackson, opens a new window's call to be "more mindful of the creation of the original materials of the universe," he wanted to create a portrait of a young Native American woman, but made by mowing and burning. It would be planted with perennials instead of annual crops.

As it happens, I was one of those standing out in the wind talking with Stan about this first prairie piece. Little did I know that decades after "Little Girl in the Wind", opens a new window rose from the earth in Salina, Stan and I would meet again in Lawrence. (As it happens, the girl in the wind, now an adult, also lives here.)

In the meantime, Stan travelled. Not just across Kansas, but around the globe, touching down to create new earthworks in New York City, Cuba, Peru, China, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, and Spain. Plus, quite a few in Kansas and other states. 

As Stan's reputation grew, his materials and techniques often changed, but all along he was guided by history, community, the land, and his own art training. Sometimes his materials were people in colored t-shirts, bent over so the photographer flying above could see them clearly. Sometimes his materials were rocks. In 1992, 500 years after Columbus, Stan made the Medicine Wheel at what was then called Haskell Indian Junior College, with the help of students and faculty. Two years later, he published an autobiographical survey of his work, the coffee-table book called "Crop Art," which is loaded with photos and colorful storytelling. In 1996 he was voted "Kansan of the Year," and in 2009 the award-winning movie Earthwork was made from a real chapter in his life, featuring (in absentia) a certain person whose name the whole world now knows, as well as a passel of notable Lawrencians.

We Are "Of The Prairie"

At 2 PM on Saturday, February 21, the Grassland Heritage Foundation, opens a new window will bring Stan to Lawrence Public Library for "An Artist's Life," the latest in their Prairie Presentation series, opens a new window. He follows recent talks by KU soil ecologist Liz Koziol, and Nebraska prairie ecologist/photographer Chris Helzer.

When Grassland Heritage contacted us about hosting this presentation, I jumped at the opportunity to reconnect with Stan and ask him a few questions. We started chatting when I bumped into him in a coffee shop, but soon he got busy painting, and we continued via email. Stan has a lot to say, and he says it well. He has some great photographs to share, too.

After some catching up and some unavoidable talk about the state of the world, Stan regaled me with tales from his travels in Peru. Thinking about what he said in his book and in a few articles I'd read, I asked more about his art.

His early influences included van Gogh (sunflowers often pop up in Stan's works), Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and the mysterious Nazca geoglyphs of South America. After he moved to Lawrence in the mid-1980s, he worked with the esteemed painter of Kansas landscapes, Robert Sudlow, and studied printmaking under John Talleur. He also cites painter/printmaker Roger Shimomura as an influence.

When I asked about books, Stan surprised me. If I were a betting man, I'd bet nobody would guess his favorite book. Even if I hinted that I've read it too, and that we both met the author when he visited The Land Institute. Any guesses?

"My favorite book, which is kind of my bible, is Pacific Shift by William Irwin Thompson." Stan continued, "For pure genius, I like W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge — brilliant writing which has guided my 'life of adventure' seeking the spiritual. Currently I am trying to get through Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom. As for art books, I often go to Picasso's book of lithography and just scan his multitude of ideas."

Then I asked about prairie, and I'm going to let Stan's words wrap it up:

I grew up in southwest Kansas, on the border of the Oklahoma Panhandle. We were on the northern edge of the High Plains, the Llano Estacado, land of the Kiowa and Comanche, and I spent many years of my youth traveling down to the Cimarron River, identifying with that sagebrush-covered shortgrass prairie before I ever discovered the tallgrass prairie to our north and east. Of course I drove through the southern edge of it on my way to college at WSU.

The first time you leave Wichita and head to Topeka or Lawrence at sunset, or when the prairie grasses are set on fire, you discover this amazing landscape. My friends Louie Copt, Bob Sudlow, and Clare Doveton, along with a hundred others, took the lead from Birger Sandzen to immerse ourselves into this ancient seabed and connect with the soul of that land. I drive out every year to watch the first week of butterfly milkweed reaching early bloom, just to witness this amazing color dotting the muted palette of gray-green grasses and one hundred other prairie plants. This has become something of a religious pilgrimage.

Twenty years ago, my son Evan and I walked one hundred miles from Lawrence to Cottonwood Falls over a week, to observe (and paint) the first week of the milkweed flowering. It may be the best week of my life! I've easily painted over one hundred paintings of the prairie, and I ain't done yet! I helped create, with Scott Richardson and Kevin Willmott, the term Prairie Renaissance. At least that is our claim. We are "of the prairie."

I've spent great days sitting at the feet of Wes Jackson at the Land Institute, and my portrait of La Nina y El Viento — a two-acre portrait of Kickapoo woman Carole Cadue on land owned by Governor Graves — evolved with the help of Wes's Land Institute interns on the edge of Salina. Wes Jackson has been a guide for art and my life. My hope was to utilize the effort — beyond the story of the "portrait of indigenous woman" as the first in a hoped for series globally — to mirroring Wes Jackson's research and the Land Institute's mission statement, using the natural prairie as a guide to a return of a more sustainable approach to modern agriculture.

—Jake Vail is an Information Services Assistant at Lawrence Public Library.