In the spring of 1982, two acres of land in Lower Manhattan, in the Battery Park City landfill) were transformed into a wheatfield by the Hungarian-born New York SoHo artist Agnes Denes, who trucked in 200 loads of topsoil to the landfill created mostly by the construction of the World Trade Center Towers.
Her project was in the shadows of the Twin Towers and with the New York Stock Exchange looming just outside. Denes had said her idea was for "an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world's richest real estate."
Denes and her handful of volunteer assistants cleared the site of garbage, removed rocks, boulders and wires by hand, set up an irrigation system, weeded, put down fertilizer, sprayed against mildew, placed the seeds by hand, and maintained the two-acre rectangular field for four months. Each furrow took two to three hours.
Once the wheat had matured over three months, the group harvested it on Aug. 16, with a yield of more than 1,000 pounds. After providing hay to the mounted New York City police, they took the crop on the road to 28 cities to distribute it to people who would spread the seeds.
Denes, who was born a few years before the rest of the (almost entirely male) land artists, has a different agenda than theirs: “I decided,” she once said, “that we had enough public sculptures of men sitting on horses.”
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