‘This will take forever’: My crop art journey to the Minnesota State Fair

I don’t even know what millet is used for.

That’s what I cried out to my spouse, the night before the deadline to submit crop art for the Minnesota State Fair competition.

Flour? He offered. (Also birdseed, I later learned.)

It feels strange to not know the usefulness of a thing after handling it a few thousand times. In the preceding weeks, armed with a toothpick dipped in glue, I secured an ocean of millet seeds, one by one, on a wood board. For art!

I did come to know quite a bit about millet, just nothing anyone but a crop artist would find useful.

For example, the seed comes in a range of yellows, from buttercream to toasted caramel. It can be as small as a poppy seed (more on that later) and as large as a peppercorn. It’s mostly round but it has a slanty slide, like a tiny butternut squash with a diagonal chunk lopped off.

This knowledge comes in handy when trying to complete what feels like the world’s most intricate puzzle.

My crop art journey began in June. I’d reported on the folk art for a few years and found it so beautiful, playful and peculiar. I wanted to try it and get inside the mind of a crop artist during what feels like a golden age for the art form. 

Crop Art 101

So I signed up for the “Crop Art 101” class at the Wet Paint art shop in St. Paul, taught by two giants in the Minnesota crop art scene, Jill Moe and Marta Shore. 

“I love crop art, because everybody can make crop art and everybody can have their crop art displayed [at the fair],” Moe told the class. (It’s true — as long as you follow the extensive rulebook, your art goes on the wall.)

Shore is a crop artist and the assistant superintendent of crop art at the State Fair, where she has her own special display.  

“Even though I can't compete,” Shore said, “personally, it is my form of meditation.”

Shore gave a detailed presentation on the history of crop art, from the “Seed Queen” Lillian Colton and her daughter Linda Paulsen to the 2015 Bill Cosby rapeseed “scandal” to today.

“It definitely has its history as a folk art in the Midwest, in Minnesota, but crop art as you see it at the State Fair, officially started in the mid-60s,” Shore said. “Crop art got elevated into what we think about as art, and got more attention, when our queen, Lillian Colton, started making pieces. Lillian Colton was a hairdresser in Owatonna who had a fine art background.”

Moe then taught the class about different seeds and techniques, instructing us on everything from tracing images to gluing methods.

It all seemed so approachable, straightforward, simple. Although there were a few red flags along the way.

Moe told the class: “There's always a period of time, the 24 hours before the fair, that I curse myself and think, Why? Why did I ever think this would be a good idea?”

Shore added: “The unofficial motto of crop art is: This will take forever.”

This is not a corn cob pipe

Many crop artists I’ve interviewed over the years start their State Fair pieces in the winter and spring.

Others procrastinate, like me. I started in late July.

But I felt confident because I was entering the novice category (only first-timers can do this) and I had chosen a simple design: A corn cob pipe on a cream background with some cursive black text beneath that says: “This is not a corn cob pipe.”

It's a play on the 1929 painting “Ceci n'est pas une pipe” (or, “This is Not A Pipe”) by Surrealist painter René Magritte.  Shore had told the class that the crop art competition loves a good pun.

(At the time, I patted myself on the back for my offbeat inspiration, only to see later that Magritte was the most-referenced artist in the exhibit this year. In fact, the Minneapolis Institute of Art gave an award to the artists Amy and Steve Saupe for their amazing piece of a corn dog that says “Ceci n'est pas un corn dog.” Magritte even spread into the Fine Arts Competition: Lucas Tschida of White Bear Lake entered a digital artwork of hotdish, titled “No, Yeah No.This is a hotdish,” that says in cursive, “Ceci n'est pas une casserole.”)

Using popcorn kernels, red lentils and wild rice, I was able to fashion the corn cob pipe quite quickly. Next up was the black cursive, which was more delicate, so I called Shore for advice.

“What I would recommend you do is get poppy seeds,” Shore said. “They're kind of the smallest black, so I feel like those are the easiest to write with.”

So, I went and got poppy seeds. But did you know how tiny poppy seeds actually are? Or that they come in a mix of colors? The black ones are all mixed in with gray and charcoal seeds.

I spent an hour trying to pick them out and had maybe 30 seeds to show for it. All the great crop art I’d seen using poppy seeds flashed through my head. How did they do it? There was no time!

I made a mental note to share my admiration with every artist who makes it look easy, and aborted plan poppy. I went with the much more reasonably sized canola, a very dark auburn, not black, seed, but close enough.

Millet in bed

Now, all that was left was the easy part: the simple cream background. Little did I know this was the true test of my devotion to the art form. 

I tried the flooding technique I learned in class, where you paint a thick coating of glue and pour on a layer of seeds, and then push them into place with a toothpick.

I couldn’t get the hang of it. The millet would just cluster in a goopy mess. Seed by seed, it had to be.

At first, it was charming and satisfying, nudging the little yellow dots snugly into place, wrapped in a blanket of glue (Mod Podge for the curious).

How long could it really take?

I stopped counting after the 25-hour mark. 

The unofficial motto of crop art — “This will take forever” — began to haunt me.

For two weeks, it felt like no progress was made at all. The bare part of the wood board never seemed to shrink. The process was teetering between meditation and flagellation.

My neck hurt, my toothpick hand cramped. I was finding millet in bed and seeing it on the back of my eyelids when I went to sleep.

I felt like giving up.

You’re one of us now!

Then, all of a sudden, I reached a critical mass and progress grew swift. I glued my last seeds a few hours before submissions were due.

Moe said this was common.

“It’s like the interest on a mortgage or something,” Moe said.“You're one of us now!”

I described my seed-by-seed journey to Shore, and she cautioned against chasing perfection, an easy trap when working on such a minuscule scale.

“Yes, we can always get the seeds closer. We can always get them flatter, but it's also really important to not drive yourself over the edge,” Shore said. “We're going to put it up on the wall no matter what.”

She’s right. My piece isn’t perfect, but I love it, and it’s hanging on the wall at the fair (surrounded by beautiful artworks, many of which expertly use poppy).

Against my better judgment, I can’t wait to start the next one.

I’m told this, too, is common.

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