Field of Corn has puzzled visitors to Ohio for over 30 years.

Field of Giant Corn

Dublin, Ohio

Rising from an otherwise empty field in a northwest suburb of Columbus, a crop of giant white corn-on-the-cobs puzzle the average onlooker. Did an ancient volcano erupt and fossilize these ghostly giant vegetables in place, like the poor people of Pompeii? Is it a "Cornhenge" -- an enigmatic monument left by the Wyandot ancestors of Chief Leatherlips up the road?

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Well, no, it's just an odd work of comparatively recent art.

"Field of Corn (with Osage Oranges)" was created by local sculptor Malcolm Cochran. The Dublin Arts Council brought him to the empty half-acre site in 1993 and said, essentially, "Whaddya think?" Cochran saw the line of old Osage Orange trees along the west edge of the field and knew that early farmers had planted that type of tree as a natural bug repellent. Had this, he asked, once been a farm field? It had been, he was told, 30 years earlier, when farmer Sam Frantz -- a member of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Seed Authority Committee -- used it to develop tasty mutant strains of hybrid corn.

Initially viewed as a joke, Field of Corn is now seen as an important work of public art.

That was all the information that Cochran needed. Plaques beneath the Osage Orange trees give the particulars: Cochran first made molds of three different husked ears of corn, using a hybrid that would have been familiar to farmer Frantz. He enlarged them to people-size -- each slightly over six feet tall -- and had 109 of them cast in white architectural concrete (He used over 80 tons of the stuff). Cochran then anchored each corn-on-the-cob upright in the ground, alternating the three different molds and rotating them in slightly different directions so that when viewed together, none of the kernel patterns would match.

Ghostly sentinels of an agricultural past.

Cochran planted his white corn in regimented rows, suggesting, he said, the rows of identical white tombstones in a military cemetery. In this way, said Cochran, the ears of corn represented people, and the overall artwork memorialized the loss of agriculture in the face of suburban sprawl. The neighborhood is indeed a sprawl casualty, with the field mostly surrounded by corporate office parks and bland business buildings.

Field of Corn was dedicated on October 30, 1994. For a time it was regarded as a regional joke: a garden patch of giant, inedible food, paid for with tax dollars. But as the years passed the bad feelings were forgotten, and Ohio now promotes Field of Corn as one of its top public artworks.

Unaware of its somber subtext, visitors today mostly overlook the explanatory plaques under the Osage Orange trees and just wander through the field. They sometimes dress individual corn-on-the-cobs in custom outfits for funny photos, or pose as if comically biting one of the melon-size kernels.