Just a Bit More Crop Art

Boréal, a shop on Como Avenue in Saint Paul, is showing several dozen crop art works from the Minnesota State Fair in its Art Loft until September 28. I got a chance to stop in a few days ago. 

Because there are so many fewer pieces and there's no crowd, the experience is startlingly different. You can also stand inches away from each work if you want to. 

I saw one that I don't remember noticing:

Private equity — my not-favorite thing. How did I miss this one the first time?

And these two, which I do remember, but I now appreciate much more, once that I could see them up close, and particularly take time to look at their accompanying seed cards:

So many clever choices to create the colors and textures on the animals.

Hulled oat groats and corn, painted in pastels. Who would have thought?
 

State Fair 2026, Part 2

My non-resistance State Fair photos are not as numerous, have no fear. But they aren't all non-political; they just are not necessarily related to Metro Surge like the ones from yesterday.

First, the crop art. I'm not sure I've seen any of these on social media.

As always, click any piece to enlarge and see the details. 

Curatorial arrangement is sometimes key. (Note that the left-hand piece is completely made with quinoa, which is being eliminated as a usable crop next year.)

More squirrels. 

Did you know the Tilt-a-Whirl ride is from Fairbault, Minnesota?

I'm not so interested in the fact that one of our local radio stations is 21 years old this year, but I can't get over the fact that the white braided-looking parts of the octopus are made from hand-painted wild rice grains. 

This is one of the works where the artist used red onion skin as a background element. It looks like stained glass.

Then a few pieces from the art show:

American Huaco: AR-15 by Guillermo Guardia, ceramic.

Tomato Garden,  Lily Lund, porcelain. Probably my favorite piece in the Art Show.

The Fairy Who Bartered Her Wings, Ryan Dolan, ceramic.

I didn't take any photos of two-dimensional work, except a few Surge-related pieces. It was very busy in there and kind of overwhelming. 

I walked 6.4 miles going to, at, and from the Fair.
 

 

State Fair 2026, Day 1

I went to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday. As you may have heard, our crop art has been getting more and more popular. Last year we waited about 20 minutes before the building opened to get inside. This year, news had spread that the waits even for those who got in line before the building opened were an hour, and through the day they were worse.

As expected, there's a high percentage of imagery related to ICE, immigration, and Metro Surge. Many of the pieces can be seen in this PDF posted on cropart.com or in this wonderful BlueSky thread (with alt tags, and it also gives background on crop art generally).

Unlike some other years, I didn't take many general Fair photos that are worth sharing: just ones from Crop Art, Creative Activities, and the Art Show. So I thought I would do two posts: today is resistance day, and tomorrow will cover everything else.

As always, click on any image to see it larger. 

First, the Guernica crop art by Jennifer Nelson that has gotten a lot of attention:

This is a beautiful piece with many details to appreciate, but the one I had completely missed before was the use of wild rice on the loon's wings:

(If you haven't already heard, the markings in the triangular word balloons coming out of Alex Pretti and Renee Good's mouths are their last words rendered in Morse code.)

Other Metro Surge crop art that I hadn't seen talked about online before going to the Fair much or at all:

Just beautiful craft on this one. The green peas (?) around the edge add just an extra special touch.

These three were together, very high on the wall. 

This George Morrison-like piece is made out of pieces of birch bark.

There were so many creative ways of covering up the "F" in FUCK ICE. (Crop art has only one rule: it has to be family-friendly.) This one says "Free to be nice."

Resistance images in the Art Show have gotten less coverage than the crop art. The ones that have are the grid of STOP ICE stop sign photos and a dramatic black and white tear gas photo. Both are great, but here are a couple that are less in your face.

Faye Passow is a well-known Minnesota lithographer. Her small print, Worry and Wonder, captures the feeling of the time.

The sculpture It was Time to Blow the Whistles by Barbara Bridges serves as a memorial.

The Creative Activities building had its share of Metro Surge as well:

A weaving of the Burlesque of North of America screen print that was everywhere. (For those not from here, their screen print is based on the Minneapolis snow emergency signs.)

Knitting and crocheting, and other craft work by many people, all on surge themes.

Doll clothes of the resistance, ICE, and Greg Bovino's Nazi coat.

Each year, Creative Activities invites themed one-panel "quilts on a stick." This year the theme was "250 years," for obvious reasons. 

Many of the ones submitted didn't turn out as the planning committee might have anticipated:

Yes, that is a dumpster fire on the right.

And then there are all of the versions of bathrobe woman, Sam Stroozas, a Minnesota Public Radio producer photographed in her green bathrobe in February as she filmed ICE crashing and then chasing a man in Saint Paul. She was in all three areas.

She appears in crop art:

Ceramics:

Painting:

Crochet:

And I hear she was knitted, but I didn't see that one.  

Beasts of Beaver Meadow

I didn't look into the second Pennsylvania environment builder very much before deciding to go there during my recent road trip. (Daughter Number Three-Point-One scouted it from Atlas Obscura.) 

The Beasts of Beaver Meadow is farther off the beaten path than Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, at least from the direction we were coming from. We traveled some almost-back roads to get there, and I wasn't sure online maps would stay with us the whole way across rural Pennsyvania, so I had written the directions down. They consisted of "this road becomes this road becomes this road," then "turn right then left at this area that's very hard to describe"... and things like that. So I'm glad the 5G or LTE or whatever it was stayed in place well enough the whole time.

We eventually found the Beasts at 1200 Berwick Street in Beaver Meadows. They aren't that far east of I-81 and the substantial city of Hazelton, but we were coming from the southeast, so the shortest way was a circuitous route. 

The Beasts were created by Joseph Woitko from concrete, glass, car parts, and other found objects, so classic outsider artist work. 

 

Woitko is clearly into the macabre. There were a lot of skulls:

Other pieces were hard to interpret (not that that's necessary):

He frequently use some molds with his concrete work, like the ice cream cones in this castle (I think it's a castle):

I didn't see everything (for instance, I just realized there are pieces on the opposite side of the road). 

As a side note, the steep and somewhat treacherous slope on the woodsy, shaded ground was covered with sweet woodruff, a nice ground cover. I've never seen so much of it on one location:

All in all, it has more of a haunted feel — whether that's intentional or not.

 

 

Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden

Pennsylvania, it turns out, is not the greatest place to look for environment-builders and outsider artists, according to Roadside America and Atlas Obscura. There are finds in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, sure, but in the rest of the state, not so much. 

There are two exceptions in the parts of the state I covered on this trip, though. The best one was Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, which I found on Atlas Obscura. It's at 248 S. 3rd Street in the nice small town of Hamburg, which is about two-thirds of the way from Harrisburg to Allentown (north of Reading). 

Rhodes is a welder, but he's also a sculptor who — unlike many reusers of found objects — paints his objects. 

The garden seen from above on one of the balconies.

Rhodes also renovated the historic duplex adjacent into several unique apartments, one of which he occupies. He's been there 25 years. The gardens are a fun accompaniment. 

My photos don't do the place and the work justice. 

This is the Seussian head of the blue-bodied creature in the next photo.

The water wheel was spinning, of course.

A warthog?

I asked Bill where he gets his found materials. He said he goes to a lot of flea markets, generally. He has two intermodal containers, one stacked atop the other, set up behind the building, that are full of pieces waiting to be used. 

Overall, it's quite an enterprise, and if you're anywhere nearby, it's worth going out of your way to visit.