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Posts Tagged ‘bad art’

A Show of Rejected Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on October 15, 2025| 4 Comments »

Photo: Burl Community Art Gallery.
Artist Julie Peters Krohn painted the rejected Minnesota State Fair entry “The Corn King” as an homage to Ron Kelsey, former superintendent of farm crops at the state fair.  It is on view for the “State Fair Rejects” exhibition at the Douglas Flanders & Associates gallery in Minneapolis.

Do you remember the Museum of Bad Art in Massachusetts? I wrote about it a few times (for example here). The art in today’s story about entries that were rejected by the Minnesota State Fair are not necessarily bad art; they just didn’t fit the taste of this year’s judges. It’s a nice challenge for the rest of us anyway. Would we reject these for an exhibition that doesn’t claim to offer high art in the first place?

A gallery in Minneapolis decided that some of these pieces really deserved to be judged by ordinary folk.

As Alex V. Cipolle reported at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), “The Fine Arts Competition at the State Fair is one of the most competitive juried exhibitions in Minnesota. This year, artists submitted a total of 2,835 pieces; only 336 were accepted.

“Minneapolis artist Mike Welton says: Don’t take it personally. Welton submitted his painting, “QUEER,” part of a series of LGBTQ-themed signage that Welton has photographed around the country. It didn’t make the cut. In his career, Welton estimates he’s shown in about a dozen Fine Art Competitions, and been rejected from about seven or eight. …

“Welton has unique insight, too. Each year Jim Clark, the fine arts superintendent, chooses artists to curate the show. In 2017, Welton was one of those artists.

“ ‘The year I curated, I couldn’t even pick pieces I wanted to because not all of them could go in,’ Welton says.

“Welton — and many other artists — are taking their rejected entries elsewhere. “Queer” will be on view for ‘State Fair Rejects,’ an exhibition … at the Douglas Flanders & Associates gallery in Minneapolis. …

“ ‘There was a lot of professional artists complaining about being rejected all the time, and I thought, well, maybe we should do a reject show,’ Douglas Flanders says. Last year was the gallery’s first reject show with 50 artist submissions. This year, Flanders says there are almost 80 artworks, from sculpture and paintings to textiles and photography. …

“ ‘People loved coming and supporting it and having another opportunity, obviously, to show their work, too, at a gallery that maybe they would otherwise never have the chance to,’ [Gallery manager Syril McNally] says. “So this year, that’s even more popular, just [by] word of mouth.”

“Beth Stoneberg of the Burl gallery [in St. Paul] says it’s the fifth time they’ve hosted ‘Rejected!’

“ ‘It’s probably one of our most anticipated exhibits of the year. It draws a remarkable crowd. It sparks a lot of conversation,’ Stoneberg says. ‘People are really rooting for the underdog.’ …

“One of her favorite submissions this year is ‘The Corn King’ by artist Julie Peters Krohn. The painting depicts Ron Kelsey, Minnesota ‘corn historian’ and the former superintendent of farm crops at the fair’s Agriculture Horticulture building. Krohn has painted Kelsey with seed sacks (Kelsey may have the largest collection of seed sacks in the world at 1,400).

“ ‘I was inspired while attending the Minnesota State fair last year after I met Ron Kelsey and his scarecrow in the agriculture building,’ Peters Krohn said in her artist statement. 

“I learned about the fair honoring him with a lifetime membership for his many years of involvement, which has included, but is not limited to, corn producer, corn judge, seed art competition creator, scarecrow competition creator and the display of his collection of vintage seed bags. I saw humor in creating a painting of a sculpture of a man so involved but so little known.’ ” More at MPR, here.

You can find a piece that actually won a 2025 State Fair prize by clicking here. It’s called “There Might Be Dragons.”

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Abandoned Art

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 8, 2021| 5 Comments »

Photo: Hakim Bishara for Hyperallergic.
An abandoned painting in Brooklyn, New York.

When I first started getting serious about the internet in the mid 1990s, the browser I used was Netscape Navigator. Remember that? One thing I really loved about it was the way it put quirky website suggestions at the top of its home page. That was how I learned about the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) in Dedham, Mass. For a long time I checked MOBA regularly to see what “new” paintings had been rescued from trash cans or abandoned on the side of a road.

I had almost forgotten about MOBA when I read a Hyperallergic story about a similar initiative, an Instagram account called Abandoned Paintings. These paintings are not necessarily “bad,” just no longer wanted. Hakim Bishara of the Soloway Gallery has a report.

“Last summer,” he writes, “while COVID-​19 was still ravaging through New York, I began noticing an unusual amount of discarded paintings on the sidewalks of my neighborhood in Brooklyn. It became an almost daily occurrence as more people moved out to the suburbs or to other states. Instinctively, I started amassing a photo archive of these paintings for a potential project. But as often is the case with new project ideas, I soon found out that someone else has already done it.

“When I stumbled upon artist Jason Osborne’s Instagram account Abandoned Paintings, which has been archiving images of discarded paintings for the last decade, I immediately became a fan. Updated daily with submissions from around the world, it pays a final tribute to these disowned artworks before they fade into the trash heap of history.

“Osborne, an artist with a self-professed fondness for fringe and forgotten art, first started Abandoned Paintings as a blog about unseen paintings in storage facilities of American museums. Soon after, he began documenting discarded paintings that he spotted on sidewalks and trash bins across New York City. …

“In 2011, he [launched] an Instagram account that quickly gained popularity. In time, he started receiving contributions from like-minded fans from across the globe, including France, the United Kingdom, and Chile.

‘As a painting junkie, I like to think of all the other lives that paintings have other than the 10% that we see on the walls of museums and galleries,’ Osborne told Hyperallergic in an interview. …

“According to Osborne, abandoned paintings appear on the streets in cycles, mostly when art students leave their studios at the end of their studies or when people move out of apartments at the end of the month. The mass exodus from NYC during 2020 seemed to interrupt that pattern, adding more abandoned paintings to the streets. …

“With new submissions and inquiries flowing into his DMs daily, Osborne has a handful of anecdotes to share about the different lives that one painting can have. For instance, there have been several cases in which artists reached out to him saying that they identified a painting they had previously sold or gifted to others. One unlucky painting was abandoned twice.

“What’s also interesting is the way that people tend to leave paintings out on the street. Unlike other discarded objects, paintings are often leaned presentably against a wall or a fence, waiting to be noticed and taken. …

“If it were up to Osborne, he would ‘fill entire museums and galleries with discarded paintings.’ But until then, he says, documenting these forlorn artworks has contributed to his understanding of painting in myriad ways.

“ ‘It solved many problems I had in my own work,’ he said.”

More at Hyperallergic, here.

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