Stan Herd crop art of giant Algerian flag will welcome World Cup team to Lawrence
As Ruth DeWitt and other World Cup organizers in Lawrence planned how to spotlight the city’s arts and culture scene during this summer’s festivities, people kept telling her:
Call Stan Herd.
Lawrence will serve as the base camp for Algeria’s soccer team, which will stay there and train at the University of Kansas’ Rock Chalk Park during the international soccer event taking place, in part, in Kansas City.
Algeria will play two matches in Kansas City, first against Argentina on June 16.
Artist Stan Herd, an internationally known creator of field-sized works of crop art, happens to call Lawrence home.
He also started following soccer a few years ago.
“I thought we’re never going to get him,” said DeWitt, community relations director for eXplore Lawrence, the city’s tourism bureau. “And sure enough, I sent him an email and he responded immediately: ‘I’m in.’”
DeWitt didn’t know Herd had already approached World Cup organizers in Kansas City.
“I’ve created a lot of my big earthworks around here and I’ve done images in other countries,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Hey, I should be doing something.’ And I just didn’t get any traction with the folks in Kansas City.
“And I know they’re incredibly busy, but I was a little disappointed. … I was wanting to do something (near) the airport or downtown.”
So he jumped at DeWitt’s request to create an earthwork in Lawrence to welcome the Algerian team to Jayhawk country. Work began on it this week.
“Very quickly we realized that the most obvious thing would be the flag. Algerians will certainly recognize that and be proud of it,” he said.
Herd’s famous earthworks, also known as land art, are enormous sculptural images “painted” on the ground with natural materials like mulch, rocks and sand. The birds-eye view — from drone, plane or very tall ladder — is the best.
Herd and his team will create an image of the flag on a piece of land near the Lied Center of Kansas performing arts venue on KU’s west campus. The plan is to have it ready by the time players and their fans arrive in early June.
“We just feel so lucky to have (Herd) represented,” said DeWitt. “It’s a connection with our ground and Algeria with their history of colonized people and how much their independence and their flag and their soccer team is part of their national identity.
“And for us to have this in the ground for them just connects us. Art always connects people regardless of culture or language. It’s such a meaningful project.”
For the ‘global’ soccer community
Herd, a 75-year-old native of Protection in the southern part of Kansas, has spent more than four decades bridging cultures with his art and supporting his “big three go-to” causes of indigenous people, women and the environment.
His first earthwork in 1981 was a field-size portrait of Santana, a Kiowa war chief in the 1860s and 1870s known as the “Orator of the Plains.”
Herd — who says “I’m pretty good at doing stuff big” — had just painted a Western-themed mural on the side of a bank in Dodge City. He liked not being confined to the size of an art canvas.
One day he thought he’d like to see what his mural looked like from the air. He hired a pilot, and as Herd took photos from the plane he saw a farmer nearby plowing a field.
He became captivated by the dark lines the tractor created as it moved diagonally across the stubble-covered field. It brought to mind shading made with charcoal on paper. A career was born.
His portfolio of commercial and philanthropic projects include earthworks across the country and around the world in Brazil, Australia, China and Cuba. He’s cajoled the earth to create massive portraits of Amelia Earhart, Maya Angelou, President Joe Biden and others.
As a newly minted fan of Sporting KC and the Kansas City Current, “I really love the whole idea of the global community that forms around this amazing game,” he said.
“And really there’s nothing like it … the energy behind the FIFA games. I am just fascinated by the whole thing, so I was over the moon that I could get involved here.”
Organizers wanted him to create the piece in town, rather than on a field outside of town. Herd worked with the Lied Center’s executive director, Derek Kwan, to place the project there.
“The two of them started looking at some land, kind of on campus where people could actually pull up and see it,” said DeWitt. “It would be more accessible than if it were … way out in a field somewhere. People who don’t have cars might be visiting.
“So they found about an acre east of the Lied Center.”
The Lied Center sits on KU’s west campus, right off highly trafficked north-south Iowa Street. It shares grounds with the Robert Dole Institute of Politics, where Herd created an earthwork of the former Kansas senator in 2023 to mark the 100th anniversary of Dole’s birth.
Herd is currently laying out the outline of the flag on the ground.
The flag’s colors are green, red and white. A red crescent moon and star in the center symbolize Islam, peace and the North African nation’s fight for independence from France.
“You know, if you look up a Google image of any flag, they show it as a graphic, straight-on depiction as if it were flat on a table,” said Herd. “Well, I found early on a beautiful image of the flag in motion. It looks like it was rippling in the breeze a bit.”
So Herd is creating an image of the flag in motion. He’ll color it with red cocoa shell mulch, red bricks and sprinklings of limestone, and mow down years-old thatch and plant new grass that will be the green of the flag.
And he has hatched a somewhat daring idea for how to make the flag look like it’s moving for drone footage.
He needs bodies. Hundreds of bodies.
The idea is to get people in colored T-shirts to stand on the image and sway back and forth as a group in an undulating pattern, like sports fans doing the wave in a stadium, “and we’ll get movement, a ripple moving through the flag,” he said. “That’s my crazy idea. We need to figure out how to at least pay for it.”
He continued.
“We don’t know yet exactly how that’s going to work, but we may get a corporate sponsor,” he said. “... The city is paying me already, but I dropped the price pretty good. I’d do it for free if I was wealthy, but I’m not.”
He wants to get enough of the flag created in the next couple of weeks so he can use those images to entice people to participate. One thought is to get youth soccer players involved somehow.
The earthwork will be promoted along with the city’s annual summer art program. The six local artists creating art installations were encouraged to use a soccer or international theme, DeWitt said. They will be unveiled at the city’s Final Fridays event in May.
DeWitt said city officials aren’t sure when the team will arrive, but they are using the early days of June as a target to have the city ready.
Herd wants people to visit the flag, “bring their dogs out, their kids out. It’s not a sacred spot. It’s a place for community gathering.
“And here’s the crazy thing. If you get down in the parking lot you’ll be able to see it on this sloping hill a little bit, so you’ll be able to read it as the flag.”
He hopes the players get to visit it, too.
“It’s like we don’t want to just host you and give you our great food, music and our community love,” said Herd.
“But we want you to feel like that you’re part of this community and that you’ll always be invited back here, that you’ll become our lifelong friends and that you’ll embrace us when we come to visit you.”
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