Not A Cornfield, But What Is It?

 

The Los Angeles Not a Cornfield project is a Christo-like art-installation on a brownfield about a half-mile south of the original city center. The site will soon be developed as Los Angeles State Historic Park.

Rows of corn rose from the dirt at the Not a Cornfield project, a 32-acre, $3-million art installation that took root this summer at Los Angeles State Historic Park in California.

The growing plants ?EUR??,,????'??+ hundreds of thousands of them ?EUR??,,????'??+ turned what once was an abandoned rail yard near the city?EUR??,,????'???s Chinatown into a sea of cornstalks.

But just where the corn stops and the artwork starts is leaving some visitors a little stumped.

“It’s very low-key, kind of conceptual, so it’s kind of hard for people to understand,” said Pasadena resident Ellen Biasin.

“I don’t know what to say about it,” said Nobe Kawano, a Boyle Heights old-timer who currently lives near Dodger Stadium.

Biasin and her family were among the few who visited the site in recent weeks as the field has gradually transformed from a brown wasteland into the living green mass that Los Angeles-based artist Lauren Bon envisioned.

Historians are not quite sure how the site got its nickname, which is, appropriately, the Cornfields.

After the corn is harvested (expected around the end of October) the Annenberg Foundation will leave behind irrigation systems, lighting, pathways, and better soil.

The project?EUR??,,????'???s web site is at www.notacornfield.info

?EUR??,,????'??+L.A. Times