Minneapolis Institute of Art will host a crop art exhibition after the State Fair wraps

The show features winners of Mia’s two new crop art awards and eight additional notable works.

The Minnesota Star Tribune
July 1, 2025 at 1:48PM
Fairgoers visit the Crop Art exhibit inside the Horticulture and Agriculture Building Minnesota State Fair in Falcon Heights at the 2024 State Fair. (Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

The 2025 Minnesota State Fair will end Sept. 1, but the crop art excitement continues on at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Its exhibition “Cream of the Crop: A Minnesota Folk Art Showcase opens Sept. 6 and includes 10 works of crop art.

A curatorial team from Mia and director and president Katie Luber will visit the State Fair and give awards to two crop artworks. The two categories are best interpretation of an artwork at Mia and best interpretation of a Minnesota landmark, story or figure.

Winners of these two awards will be included in the exhibition in the museum’s rotunda. There also will be an additional eight notable crop artworks.

“Like everyone else, everyone here is excited by the possibility of the State Fair,” Mia’s Deputy Director and Chief Curator Matthew Welch said. “So this is our way of opening the museum up and demonstrating our enthusiasm for all kinds of creativity.”

The most exciting part? No one knows what will be in the show. Everything depends on what crop artists make this year.

A seedy past

Mia has hosted crop art exhibitions before, but never like this.

In 2004, Mia had a show of 50 portraits by crop art legend Lillian Colton.

In 2015, to celebrate its centennial, Mia commissioned Kansas-based artist Stan Herd to create a 1.5 acre crop art version of van Gogh’s “Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun” in a field.

A crop art portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt by Lillian Colton, who brought her seed art at the Minnesota State Fair for decades. (Provided by Minneapolis Institute of Art)

“Mia is all about creativity and inspiration, and also we support our local artists,” Welch said. “From my perspective, crop art is incredibly Midwestern, incredibly Minnesotan, where artists are often innovative and industrious in using the materials around them.”

Marta Shore, assistant superintendent for Crop Art and Scarecrow at the Minnesota State Fair, has been doing everything she can to get crop art in front of more eyes.

She has been in this role only since last year but calls herself a “crop art evangelist.” She first discovered crop art in 2015. After winning a couple of honorable mentions at the fair in 2019, she was hooked.

The Mia-State Fair collaboration originally began when Mia’s head of marketing and communications Rob Bedeaux reached out to her about Mia sponsoring crop art awards at the fair.

“Then he came back and said, ‘What I’d really like to do is have an exhibit after the fair, at Mia,’” she said.

The State Fair responded that it didn’t have the capacity to put that together after the intensity of the fair, but Shore thought she’d like to make it happen.

“Many of the people I talked to at Mia had an appreciation of folk arts as art,” she said.

“How to Win a Crop Art Ribbon” by Joel Alter at the Crop Art exhibit inside the Horticulture and Agriculture Building Minnesota State Fair in Falcon Heights, Minn. on Aug. 23, 2024. (Leila Navidi)

Shore helped out with the “Seeds of Justice” exhibition at a U.S. Courthouse in downtown Minneapolis. That show was organized by Juventino Meza, a lawyer who serves on the Minnesota Council on Latino Affairs.

“I’m really passionate about the concept of art celebrating what makes a state great,” Shore said. “I like to tell people it’s crop art not seed art, because it’s about using plant materials from crops grown and propagated in Minnesota. So that’s kind of living off the land, celebrating Minnesota’s farming history.”

about the writer

about the writer

Alicia Eler

Critic / Reporter

Alicia Eler is the Minnesota Star Tribune's visual art reporter and critic, and author of the book “The Selfie Generation. | Pronouns: she/they ”

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