Bumper Crops for the Eye By CAROL POGASH Published: NY Times, February 2, 2005
SALINAS, Calif. - Out of the fertile fields of the Salinas Valley, the giant figures loom: 18-foot-high plywood workers harvest iceberg lettuce. An irrigator, his boot on a shovel, surveys the land. A farmer crouches nearby, his hand cupping the loamy soil. Women in headscarves thin just-budding crops. The creases in their shirts, their bodily expressions, even with their backs turned, these figures are so lifelike that their appearance startles passers-by, which is what their creator, the artist John Cerney, intends.
The giant sculptures at the Farm, an agricultural education center and demonstration farm owned by the Crown Packing Company, are but one of dozens of installations in this valley, where the land looks much as it did when John Steinbeck wrote about it.
For 22 years, Mr. Cerney has been creating giant people who pop up in fields and on storefronts all over Monterey County, which includes the Salinas Valley and is about 100 miles south of San Francisco. The expanse of blue-on-blue sky and miles of row crops serve as his canvas. "I've never cared about galleries and square things framed on a wall," Mr. Cerney said in an interview. What mattered "was that people would see my work," he said, adding "that meant working outside."
Mr. Cerney, 51, lives a pared down life in a corner of his workshop in a corrugated metal warehouse here, where he works 12 hours a day pursuing his art. Parts of giant plywood people lie strewn about. Leaning against one wall, a marathon runner raises her triumphant fist in the air. A friendly gas station attendant grasps a hose, about to fill 'er up. Even in repose there is something both ordinary and heroic about his people.
Mr. Cerney's art, said Amanda Holder, spokeswoman for the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, "does what public art should do, it enriches the landscape visually and emotionally."
The Steinbeck center commissioned him to make a plywood Marilyn Monroe for its agricultural wing. (Monroe was crowned Miss California Artichoke Queen in nearby Castroville in 1948.) He hesitated initially because he prefers his work to be displayed outdoors.
His field art, flowering in the salad bowl of America, "draws attention to the value of farmworkers," said Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains, chairwoman of the visual and public arts department at California State University, Monterey Bay. But, she said, because the farmer who commissioned the work "is positive and fair with his workers," Mr. Cerney's people fail to say anything about "poor working conditions, illnesses from pesticides and bad housing." She added, "That is a whole other story that's never told."
Mr. Cerney "brings back the tradition of regional art, roadside art," and Works Progress Administration murals from the 1930's that survive in schools and post offices around the country, said his friend, the artist D. J. Hall.
When Beverley Meamber, president and chief executive of the Salinas Valley Chamber of Commerce, called his pieces "works of art," Mr. Cerney, a marathon runner who looks younger than his years, winced, preferring to think of himself as a draftsman and illustrator. He likes digging four-foot holes and pouring the concrete for the Douglas fir posts that, along with a metal bar, hold the plywood people in place.
His work combines two parts of his life: agriculture and art. After high school, he spent seven years working for a produce company, operating a forklift, until he quit to enter college. After graduating from California State University, Long Beach, with a degree in art, he returned home to Salinas, where he knocked on a stranger's door and persuaded him to hand over the front of his building. Mr. Cerney converted an ordinary facade into a stunningly realistic mural of "Tony's Friendly Auto Service." His only payment was $50, for putting friends' licenses on the painted cars.
Since then, "Tony's" has given way to "Sam's Friendly Produce Stand," a mural on the same site with cut-out plywood characters and a truck loaded with produce boxes that is so realistic that the Chamber of Commerce has had to disabuse tourists who, having seen the picture in agricultural magazines, come to shop at Sam's.
