JCCC’s Kansas Studies Institute presents Kansas artist Stan Herd, considered the world’s preeminent representational earthwork artist. Herd will deliver his address, The Prairie Renaissance, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 10, in the Hudson Auditorium as part of the Kansas Lecture Series. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Herd will be looking at themes of prairie art and how painters, sculptors and now filmmakers are rethinking the concept of the prairie in their subject matter.

In addition, the college is working toward a permanent crop art piece created by Herd, installed on the west side of campus near the Horticultural Science Center. Leiker says the finished piece would be a collaboration between KSI, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, campus services, and the horticulture and art history programs. Students in horticulture would help implement and maintain the piece.

“We are in the beginning discussions of a Stan Herd original to be created over the next two years, contingent on funding,” Leiker said.

According to his bio, Herd has been creating art for more than 30 years – by digging, disking, plowing and otherwise manipulating acres of green space. His canvas is the great outdoors – literally, a farmer’s field, an abandoned park or even a soil-capped landfill. Born into a family who’s farmed for three generations in southwest Kansas, Herd has always had an intimate relationship with the land that’s dovetailed with his art.

Herd’s work has been featured on CBS’s Sunday Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered and What Do You Think?, Dateline NBC, Late Night with David Letterman, Tonight Show with Jay Leno and publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian Magazine, The New York Times, The New Look of Paris and The London Telegraph. A book, Crop Art and Other Earthworks, details Herd’s artistic journey through pictures and stories.