Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has had many firsts in the three weeks since Kamala Harris picked him as her running mate. A huge rally in Philadelphia after his announcement, a national speech in Chicago to accept the nomination, and now a quarter-acre portrait in Lawrence, Kansas.
When world-renowned crop artist Stan Herd completed the Harris portrait last month he left room for her running mate in a plot of adjacent land. It turns out that Walz was a little harder than Harris. "You know, he's an old white guy and he's got white hair," Herd told KCUR.
Herd said that the white hair was the biggest challenge. At first he used white sand but that didn't look right. He didn't get the color right until Sunday. "I had a bale of white wood chips that I was going to carry off the field. And at the last minute, I just busted the bale loose and spread it all over his hair," he said. "And it was perfect."
Harris was a lot easier to capture. "So doing Kamala, the lines, the highlights, the shadows, the color of the hair, everything made it more simple," he said.
Herd began working on the Harris portrait 12 days before she surfaced as the replacement for President Joe Biden. He said he just had a feeling she would get the nod. "I'm happy with it and happy with what's happening and that I'm kind of a part of that history right now," he said.
Herd's work is all over the world, including a four-acre permanent installation in China’s Yunnan Province called the Young Woman of China that took two years to build.
After finishing the Harris-Walz piece he immediately flew to Atlanta to start work on a portrait of Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of Atlanta and a civil rights icon.
