If you saw the line for crop art at the Minnesota State Fair this year and said, “to hell with all that,” you’re not alone. We watched plenty of people balk at the size of the slow-moving, crop-appreciating crowd; some of those who did get in line reported waiting up to two hours to see the display during peak times.
But you still have a chance to check out some of the year’s best pieces—and without paying the $20 admission fee—thanks to a first-of-its-kind exhibition from the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
When you work for a place like Mia, you’re always thinking about how you can bring new people in. Not just the art appreciators who reliably check out the new exhibits, or the college students who pop in with visiting parents, but the rest of the people out there who might not exactly consider themselves museumgoers.
“One of the ways that we’ve been talking about that is, ‘How do we invite people in with art-adjacent activities and things that might not be considered typically fine art?’” says Rob Bedeaux, Mia’s head of marketing and communications.
Bedeaux is also a Minnesota State Fair fan who visits every year (“You’ve gotta get your milk, you’ve gotta get your lefse”), and he always takes a look at the crop art. He’s watched in recent years as the exhibit has gone from an Ag-Hort Building oddity to a State Fair must-see, buoyed by attention from the New York Times, viral TikToks and meme-able subject matter, and the simple fact that crop art is a fascinating craft.
So, during a meeting last year, “I raised my hand and was like, ‘We should really think about crop art,’” he says. “It’s an interesting crossover between folk art and fine art, it’s a kitschy Minnesota tradition, and it’s something sort of uniquely Minnesotan.”
Everyone at the museum loved the idea, and so did the people who oversee crop art at the State Fair (including Marta Shore, who has the incredible title “Assistant Superintendent of Crop Art and Scarecrow”). And so, this weekend, Mia will begin showing “Cream of the Crop,” an exhibit of 2025 Minnesota State Fair crop art selected by museum curators.
Bedeaux joined museum curators Leslie Ureña and Galina Olmsted, as well as director Katie Luber, to observe the year’s crop art submissions the day before the fair opened. In addition to the honors doled out by the fair's judging staff, two pieces were crowned winners in a Mia-specific competition—one for being the best interpretation of a piece of art at Mia, and another for doing the best interpretation of a Minnesota landmark, story, or figure—and the victors will receive $500 in addition to having their works displayed at the museum with other crop art works selected by Mia’s curators and staff.
Mia content marketer Hattie Peach says there were more than 60 official submissions for the competition, and many more people made art inspired by the prompts. “We saw so many Mia pieces, which was shocking and amazing,” she says. Perhaps you noticed that there were more fine art-inspired pieces this year than in some other years, with crop artists riffing on everything from The Great Wave off Kanagawa to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Ureña, a transplant who moved to the Twin Cities two and a half years ago (she was previously the curator of photographs for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery), has juried other shows before, but never crop art. She was delighted by the humor and whimsy in many of the pieces, including the winning fine art piece The Treachery of a Pronto Pup. Based on Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, it was made by the father-daughter duo of Amy and Steve Saupe—and it wasn’t the only Magritte-boosting piece of crop art on display this year.
“There’s the humor of it already embedded in the original artwork by Magritte, and then the humor in terms of bringing in this very Minnesota-specific, fair-specific item,” Ureña says. “Taking that care with the mosaic… the shading, everything, even the dimensionality of that corn dog was really something that took our breath away.”
The other winning piece is by Jeanne Morales, whose My Chagall Dream plays on Marc Chagall’s dream paintings. In this interpretation, according to her artist statement, she’s “floating blissfully” above places she loves in the Twin Cities: First Avenue, the Riverview Theater, Mancini’s, Merlin’s Rest.
The “Cream of the Crop” exhibit opens this Saturday, and runs through September 28. There’s also an opening reception (free, but registration is required) on Saturday which will feature a panel with local crop artists discussing the time-consuming folk-art tradition.
This will be the first time Minnesota State Fair crop art has come to Mia, but it’s not the first time crop art has been displayed at the museum. Lillian Colton, also known as “The Seed Lady” or “The Queen of Crop Art,” showed more than 50 of her portraits there in 2004 as part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program. And it might not be the last time, either—Peach says that she hopes this collaboration could continue in the future.
“You get everything from very deep, very thoughtful entries with a lot of intention behind it—they’ve been doing art forever—and then you get these ones that are just out of pocket,” she says. “Like, I don’t know if you saw the crop art Labubus, but those were some of my favorites.”
“Cream of the Crop: A Minnesota Folk Art Showcase”
When: September 6-September 28
Where: Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 Third Ave. S., Minneapolis, in the Bruce B. Dayton Rotunda
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 13; register and find more info here
