A Monumental Portrait of NASA Astronaut Stephanie Wilson Crops Up in Atlanta
OCTOBER 11, 2021
The earthwork is the latest in land artist Stan Herd’s impressive, decades-spanning portfolio
Stretching 4,800 square feet in size, the piece coincides with the United Nations' International Day of the Girl Child initiative and is also part of World Space Week.
Courtesy of Stan Herd
Jennifer Nalewicki
While most artists measure their artworks in inches, Stan Herd measures his in acres. For the past 40 years, the Kansas-based artist has been using farmland, pastures, grassy fields and any other large swaths of open land as his canvas, creating massive earthworks that are best seen from the sky, including a massive vase of flowers and a 2005 edition of the Kansas state quarter.
Fittingly, for his next creation, which will debut today at Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta, the 71-year-old crop artist is looking up to the sky for inspiration. Stretching 4,800 square feet in size, the piece coincides with the United Nations' International Day of the Girl Child initiative and is also part of World Space Week, an annual event that celebrates global accomplishments in science and technology. Since this year’s theme is Women in Space, Herd has created a portrait of Stephanie Wilson, a veteran NASA astronaut with three space flights under her belt (she’s also the second African American woman to go into space), and one of 18 astronauts who are a part of Artemis, NASA’s lunar exploration program that is scheduled to send the first woman to the moon in 2024.
Herd, a painter and sculptor by trade who attended the University of Wichita on an art scholarship, admits that making artwork of this magnitude is no easy task. From start to finish, it can take weeks and even months to complete a single piece. To make each earthwork, Herd begins by creating a computer sketch using a grid technique that he says is “similar to the way Michelangelo created the [frescoes] on the Sistine Chapel ceiling,” where each square segment translates to a specific measurement. In the case of the Atlanta artwork, one square inch of the sketch equals 10 actual feet.
Herd calls his 4-acre creation, Young Woman of China, his most important earthwork. The piece was produced in the Yunnan Province over a two-year period with the assistance of his family and hundreds of Chinese engineers, laborers, artists, heavy equipment operators and students. Courtesy of Stan Herd
“The real art happens when I transfer the drawing onto the ground,” says Herd, who will often incorporate found elements such as rocks, mulch and dirt to add dimension to a piece. In a piece he created in 1988 which he dubbed Cola Wars, he even had volunteers dress in red and blue T-shirts to replicate a duo of oversized Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/a-monumental-portrait-of-nasa-astronaut-stephanie-wilson-crops-up-in-atlanta-180978838/
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