"Earthwork," a new film that just opened at New York's Angelika Film Center, tells the true story of Stan Herd, a crop artist from Lawrence, Kansas, who came to New York City in 1994 to make one of his Land Art "earthworks" on a strip of turf owned by Donald Trump on Manhattan's far West Side. Herd had done many of these labor-intensive projects before, but never in an urban setting. He would shape soil and crops into complex images that were only visible from far above, in an airplane. His very first project in Kansas was spread over 160 acres so that it would be visible to passengers in commercial aircraft flying 30,000 feet overhead.

In New York, Herd had only two acres to work with. In his arrangement with Trump, the artist agreed to bear the entire expense of creating the work — purchasing plants, mulch, gravel, even renting a tractor — and went deeply into debt to get the project done. The urban plot and the abandoned railway tunnels nearby were inhabited by homeless people, who ended up accepting Herd and helping him to make his artistic vision a reality.

Today, the earthwork has long since been bulldozed and the land is topped by a host of skyscrapers. But filmmaker Chris Ordal has made his first feature film out of this story, which he shot in just one month, with a single day of filming in New York. Recreating the urban site in rural Kansas involved building a massive wall over 350 feet long out of plywood, painting it to look like concrete, and having it sprayed by graffiti artists who researched and reproduced authentic tags from 1994.

Ordal got to know Herd in Lawrence, Kansas, and was hooked by the story of the artist's quixotic undertaking in New York. He had already written other scripts, but he thought that cinema was the perfect vehicle for the story of Herd's New York earthwork. "People like me were making horror movies or hipster romances," the filmmaker told ARTINFO. "There seems to be a similar kind of thing that young filmmakers can afford to make." Ordal wanted to do something different. Above all, "I wanted there to be a reason that it had to be shown in the theater." The big screen provided the perfect way to view Herd's crop art, with wide-angle shots approximating the way he wanted it to be seen. 

Ordal came up with an original way of revealing Herd's artistic practice before the film's story unfolds. The film's title sequence is composed of words spelled out by crops and plants that Herd created for the production. Ordal decided on this labor-intensive way of putting together the titles because "we had to establish him, establish what he does, why he does it, and what his art form is as quickly as possible so we can get to our story." The film's titles were the best way to do that, "and so we just decided to grow them," said Ordal, who was determined not to use digital effects, even though growing the titles "made up a huge chunk of our budget." The sequence gives texture and vision to the film, and it is beautifully evident that these are real, site-specific plants and not digital manipulations. In March 2010, "Earthwork" won two awards for excellence in opening title design at SXSW.

The film has several standout performances, including John Hawkes (of last year's "Winter's Bone") as Herd and James McDaniel as Lone Wolf, a schizophrenic homeless man who gradually becomes involved in the crop art project. Though the material could easily lapse into schmaltzy sentimentalism, the film becomes truly moving through a simple, restrained attention to images and a patient pacing that is generous to the actors' abilities. It also doesn't tack on a happy ending to the project, which took a toll on the artist and on his personal life.

For various reasons (including some bad timing), the earthwork failed to garner the national media attention that Herd had been counting on. The artist was married at the time (he and his wife subsequently divorced), and he told ARTINFO, "I did this crazy thing, and it just beat the hell out of us." Herd can be philosophical about it now, recognizing that, for all artists, "the need to create and to go out there and make it happen on a large scale has ramifications on the personal lives of the people that are supporting you and around you." Although some supporting characters were combined or invented, and Ordal made him seem "a little more of a hayseed than I actually am," Herd said that the film "bears the essential truth of the experience." "I never felt so alive in my life" as during the process of creating this earthwork, Herd said, describing how the locals would call to him in their New York accents, "Hey, fahmer!"

Herd's portfolio of recent projects is eclectic. He made an earthwork portrait of Barack Obama on a half-acre plot in Dallas during the 2008 Democratic primary and a portrait of 14th-century Islamic scholar Ibn Battuta in Lawrence in 2009 (you can see both on his YouTube channel). For a project in Havana — an image of a white rose taken from a poem by 19th-century Cuban poet José Marti — Herd scored the unusual coup of receiving support from both Fidel Castro and Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas. Still, "he has yet to get the respect that he deserves," according to Ordal, who hopes that his film will bring more attention to Herd and his unique art form.

When researching the film, Ordal went out with the artist to watch him create a piece. A farmer had offered him an abandoned plot of land, and, with nothing but dirt and a hoe, Herd made a portrait of man's face. "I was still learning about him and how he worked, and whether he was insane or not," Ordal says. "He was looking at the eyes, and he instantly got excited, ran across the field and grabbed three pieces of straw and just threw them on the ground, then adjusted them a little bit." Afterward, when the filmmaker flew over the piece in a plane, "I saw the face… and the three pieces of straw were the twinkle in the eye that brought the entire thing to life."