Artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada pushes the concept of a portrait with his natural art on the national mall. His new work “Out of Many, One” is a portrait that can only be appreciated fully from the Washington Monument windows 500 feet above the ground, where visitors can see the 6-acre portrait made up of 2,000 tons of sand, 800 tons of soil, and 8 miles worth of string.

The artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada was commissioned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. The land on the national mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial was originally meant to be in the National Park Service’s turf restoration before the Smithsonian asked Rodriguez-Gerada to create his portrait. This portrait is unique in the fact that the man in the dirt does not exist. He is a composite of 30 men ranging from ages 18 to 24 of all ethnicities. “’It’s not the face of America. It’s the face of one of the hundreds of millions of faces that America has,’“ says Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada.

Rodriguez-Gerada’s use of technology in his art brings the old fashioned portrait idea to a more modern age. In order to create his portrait, he used Photoshop to lay the photos of the men over each other in order to create the man’s face he used in the end. He also used high tech GPS with which Rodriguez-Gerada was able to pin point where he wanted to place 10,000 pegs which he marked with twine. These twines show where he wanted the rows and the different types of soils for the man’s face.

He started work on his piece in September. It opened on October 4th and will close in a month when the National Park Service will till over the sand and cover it up with turf. The irony of completing such a enormous piece is that it will disappear over time due to wind and erosion. In short, the face was made to be destroyed.

Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada was born in Cuba in 1966. He and his family immigrated to America when he was a small child and he was educated at Jersey City State College. Now at the age 48, “Out of Many, One” is the not the largest work he has ever created, but one of several. Rodriguez-Gerada has worked on many projects including his identity series, identity composite identity, terrestrial series, culture jamming, urban analogies, and fragment series.

“Out of Many, One” is the first of Rodriguez-Gerada’s art pieces that is in the United States of America. He has done work in other countries such as Ireland, Spain, and the Netherlands. In fact Rodriguez-Gerada created a portrait of Barack Obama in the soil of Barcelona, Spain.

“Out of Many, One” is actually a very prevalent phrase in America. It is translated to “E Pluribus Ucum” which is a phrase on coins and bills in America.