The Woman Who Harvested a Wheat Field Off Wall Street

But behind her, incongruously, a slice of the World Trade Center skyscrapers is clearly visible.The woman was Agnes Denes, the artist who created one of the most significant artworks in New York City history, “Wheatfield — A Confrontation,” a two-acre wheat field that was planted in May 1982 on the landfill that would eventually become Battery Park City, was harvested that August and then disappeared forever from the site. “I wanted to know the clean language of art, that I feel is the cleanest, because it’s transparent and it’s unselfish — well, mostly — and to get that truth that it conveys.” Asked why she decided to plant a wheat field in Manhattan, she simply says, “I wanted to do something that was meaningful.”Denes secured $10,000 in backing from the Public Art Fund, a nonprofit that has been producing works since 1977. By the early ’80s, the group had started to display creations by artists such as Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer on the Spectacolor sign in Times Square; “Wheatfield” wound up being one of the organization’s most ambitious projects.Initially, Denes says, the Public Art Fund encouraged her to grow wheat in the quieter borough of Queens. The magic of the piece, then as now, was the setting: Significantly, it was the rare example of the Land Art genre that wasn’t off in some remote place, like the Great Salt Lake or the Painted Desert — or, for that matter, Queens.Denes, an assistant and a small group of volunteers toiled every day for a month to plant two acres of wheat on soil that, she wrote in a project description, was “full of rusty metals, boulders, old tires and overcoats.” (Much of the Battery Park landfill was created by the holes that were dug during the construction of the twin towers.) “I worked 16 hours a day,” Denes says.