CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Jake Van Yahres grew up playing in what is now Market Street Park in Charlottesville’s downtown. So, as city officials pondered what to do with the space in the park where the controversial R.E. Lee Statue once stood, Van Yahres decided to visit the location himself.

What he found was a patch of dirt. What he saw was a canvas.

“I wanted to put my own stamp on this,” Van Yahres told Cville Right Now.

That stamp ended up being a portrait of famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman made of sod and grass paint.

The 37-year-old Van Yahres installed the project on Friday – Juneteenth – arriving at the park before 7 a.m. It took about 45 minutes to install the painted sod after 40 hours of prep work and design. Since Van Yahres didn’t have a permit to put his project in the public park, and because he knew placing a tribute to an anti-slavery champion in the place where the Lee statue once stood could draw a strong reaction, he did the work early in the morning.

“It’s just a different medium,” Van Yahres said. “It’s the same as drawing with a pencil. Obviously, it’s a little more challenging. I try to come at it from an angle where most people would be like, ‘Man, I would have never thought of that.'”

His sister, Marcelle, helped him with the installation. The two laid down the sod on the dirt in what he said was an empty park Friday morning. One of the biggest challenges of the project, Van Yahres said, was accounting for the depth perception of people viewing the portrait from ground level.

“If you were to look at it, actually from the sky, it would look out of proportion,” he said.

Van Yahres said he actually tried to install his art on Wednesday morning, but didn’t like the way it looked.

“I ripped it all out,” he said.

Van Yahres, who played soccer at American University and Virginia Commonwealth after graduating Charlottesville High School, studied art in college. His family has long ties to the city, including owning a tree-care company for over 100 years.

Van Yahres, who graduated from VCU in 2010, owns a graphic design company, specializing in creating logos and murals.

His unusual art projects have gained national acclaim, including a mural made of tennis balls he did in Brooklyn for the U.S. Open, and the chalk walk – depicting interlocking white and black fingers – at the spot where Heather Heyer was killed during the Unite the Right violence in Charlottesville in 2017.

It was that incident that Van Yahres said motivated him to want to tackle a public art project in Market Street Park.

“It comes back to all the violence in Charlottesville in 2017,” he said. “I was in San Francisco. It was very frustrating seeing it and being so far away. I couldn’t do anything. It was kind of absurd to me that all of this was coming from this park, where I grew up going my whole life. It wasn’t on anyone’s radar. No one cared about the park. To see it taken in a divisive way and the city kind of turned upside down, it was just really frustrating to me.”

As for the future of the portrait, Van Yahres said that’s beyond his control. He’d love to coordinate with the city to keep the portrait there until work begins on a permanent use for the space and said that, if the sod is watered, it could even take root.

Van Yahres also knows that someone he disagrees with his messaging could wreck the artwork.

“I know the rules of the game with public art,” he said. “It’s there for the public and if someone’s going to destroy it, it is what it is. That’s beyond my control. It would be amazing if I could work with the city to preserve it.”