Adventures in crop art

The 2024 Crop Art Show

When I go to the Minnesota State Fair, every year, after seeing the crop art, I think “I want to try that. That could be fun.’ And then July of the next year rolls around, and I haven’t tried it. Every year. Except 2024.
Soon after the fair in 2023, I bumped into Scott Lunt at Fall Fest, and we were talking about cool art, crafts and stuff like that, and we both mentioned our unfulfilled wish to be in on the crop art fun. Scott had the brilliant idea of forming a club that would get together to figure out how to do it, and hold each other accountable to finish and enter something. If you live in Duluth, you know that Scott Lunt has all the good ideas.

It was decided that this was a depths-of-winter activity, when there wouldn’t be much else to do and we might be looking for a reason to leave the house. So in January, the inaugural meeting of The Seed afFAIR was held. Yeah, we know, the name is inaccurate – it’s “crop” art, but we’re rebels. Don’t get mixed up with guys like us.
Because making a crop art piece is a pretty big commitment, we opened the club up to crafts of all kinds. At the first couple of meetings, we had people doing crochet, making a diorama, making puppets, mending clothing, and some people who just came by to see what the hell this was about. In all, there were probably 12-15 people who attended or wandered through.

Hoops Brewing was kind enough to let us spread out and take over a few tables on Sunday afternoons. We thought we would be switching up the time and location, but Hoops on Sunday afternoon turned out to be just fine with most everyone.

Some people did small practice pieces to get a feel for just how insane this art form is. I just dug in on the pieces I would end up entering. I found a sketch that I thought looked fun, transferred them to thin sheets of plywood, and started glueing. Barley, navy beans and flax were my first seeds I tried. Flax is hard. It’s shiny and slippery, and the smaller the seeds are, the more they are affected by static electricity. The bigger they are, like beans and popcorn, the harder it is to pick them up with just a toothpick and a dab of glue. That was my preferred method – a toothpick with just enough glue on the end to pick up the seed, bean, legume, grain or whatever. Then you carefully put it in place into a pool of glue you have already put on an area of the plywood. Then you do that again. And again. And again.