A Mona Lisa made of seeds: the quirky craft of crop art
When Laura Melnick arrived at a gathering hosted by her husband’s colleague over 25 years ago, she quickly realized this was no ordinary house party. Containers of seeds, toothpicks and Elmer’s glue topped the tables, and guests created pictures with dried seeds and beans that they stuck on to boards.
This was Melnick’s first introduction to crop art, a craft that uses seeds, grains, leaves or other botanical materials instead of paint or clay. She had fun with it, so after the party she and her family started making their own crop art. Then she saw artist Alan Carpenter’s kitschy seed portraits at the Minnesota state fair; in his The Vices of First Ladies: Mrs John F. Kennedy Smoking, Jackie Kennedy holds a cigarette while she burns in flames. It used about a dozen kinds of seeds, including two colors of clover, multiple kinds of millet and the common poppy seed. Inspired by Carpenter’s quirkiness, Melnick decided to take her seed art game to a new level.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, this guy is hilarious,’” she recalled. “THAT’S what I want to do.” She’s been practicing crop art ever since.
She was in the right place for it. Minnesota has the nation’s most active community of seed artists. Crop art debuted at the Minnesota state fair in 1965, showcasing works using plant materials grown in the state. Decades later, the wildly popular crop art exhibit and competition attracts over 200,000 visitors to the fair in late summer.
All entries must use materials grown in Minnesota; software engineer and illustrator Nick Rindo noted that this year’s minor controversy was the use of yellow mustard, which produces a bold golden hue but isn’t a commercial crop in the state. Cannabis seeds and risque content are off-limits. And entries that use natural seeds or materials compete separately from those that are painted or dyed (dye is really the only option to achieve some colors).
Seed art has artistic antecedents in mosaics of broken glass, ceramics or stone affixed to a surface with cement. The more intricate designs found in crop art also evoke pointillism, in which arrangements of small dots of paint or ink form an image.
Melnick, a legal aid attorney, started participating in the state fair’s crop art exhibition in 1998, shortly after the crop art party. She admits that her early experiments were a bit “lumpy”; she initially just poured the seeds on top of glue. Now she individually places seeds one by one with a toothpick, a painstaking process that yields a cleaner result, albeit with a physical toll. “My neck gets really sore,” Melnick laughed. “We call it ‘crop art neck’.”
The process generally includes tracing or freehand drawing an image, which is then transferred on to a board surface using a wax-resist paper or paint pens. Artists use a variety of instruments – toothpicks, loom knit hooks, dot art tools or nail art instruments – to place seeds. After color-sorting the materials, they place the seeds on the board with craft glue. To achieve more precise lines and shapes, seeds may be cut to size with a hobby knife.
Melnick is known for adapting beloved children’s book characters such as Babar and Curious George into humorous, sometimes biting parodies of current events.
This year, her award-winning compositionThoughts and Prayers was inspired by Maurice Sendak’s 1962 book Pierre: A Cautionary Tale. Melnick riffed off the young title character who casually ignores the violence around him and repeats “I don’t care.” The 18in x 24in piece connects Pierre’s apathy with that of Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association. The title of her work questions the superficial support and sentiment often heard after mass shootings. The border of the image bears the dates of mass shootings and number of dead, and the center features a short verse from Melnick: “NRA CEO LaPierre / is unable to make himself care / About guns of assault / or assign human fault / as mass shootings, we know, / are quite rare.”
Nick Rindo has created everything from a tantrum-throwing, diaper-wearing baby Trump to a visual obituary of Pee Wee Herman. He even crafted a Bill Cosby picture out of rapeseed. That politically charged seed choice got the piece booted from display during the Minnesota fair in 2015, soon after a number of women alleged the entertainer sexually assaulted them.
While some seed artists take on political events, the art has historically leaned figurative. That focus on portraits is partly the legacy of Lillian Colton. Often called the Warhol of crop art, she created elaborate portraits of well-known historical figures, contouring facial features with skilled precision.
At the annual Minnesota fair, seed portraits have run the gamut from photorealist images of Lucille Ball, likenesses of Little Richard and portraits of Prince, the self-proclaimed Purple Yoda of Minnesota (Rindo created what he called Purple Grain, a tribute to the late superstar, with his future wife, who sorted all the hues of purple corn from light to dark).
Colton’s work inspired Stephen Saupe, a botanist and retired biology professor at the College of St Benedict and St John’s University. Saupe’s love for plants and gardening drew him to the craft, but he credits his daughter Amy, an epidemiologist, for encouraging him to try his hand.
“We’ve been state fair nerds for years, and we would go through the crop art displays and see the work on the wall. One summer day, Amy came home with a whole boatload of seeds that she got at the local co-op. She and I sat down at the kitchen table and created a work of the solar eclipse. It was our first piece ever; it opened a can of worms and created the monster that seed art has become for us.” Since that first collaboration in 2017, the pair bonded over their shared love of science and have done seed art linking the Covid pandemic with flu and polio outbreaks in previous eras.
This year, however, they also took first place honors in the natural colors amateur division with a replica of the Mona Lisa. The legendary beauty smiles mysteriously against a backdrop of a Ferris wheel and other local state fair iconography.
Stephen also submitted his solo take on Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s classic Girl With a Pearl Earring. He wanted his rendition to answer two questions about Vermeer’s masterpiece. What kind of earring was she really wearing? Art historians have debated this, some saying it was too large to be an actual pearl. And what lurked in Vermeer’s dark background? For the young model’s earring, he used a large tear-shaped bean seed called Job’s Tears, harvested from his home garden. But he also hid another element in the background. Steve Saupe’s answer to what the darkness concealed: aliens.
“I thought I’d throw the aliens in as a little surprise for someone who actually spent more time looking at it,” he joked.
The piece won Stephen a blue ribbon in the seniors category, much to Amy’s chagrin. “She wouldn’t let me put one in our Mona Lisa.” But the aliens were a hit. “Now my goal is to try to put an alien in every image,” he said.
Crop art is often a family affair. Teresa Anderson and husband, Joel, host the site CropArt.com and publish artists’ work. Stephen and Amy Saupe are represented, as are Melnick, husband Mark Dahlager and their adult children.
And what happens to the crop art after the fair? “Kind people have asked if we wanted to sell them,” quipped Saupe. “But we’ve put so much time and effort into it, they would be horrified by the amount of money we would want.”
Rindo sold his first piece, of William Shatner as Captain Kirk, for $1,000 when a hardcore Trekkie kept asking him to buy it, though he said crop art comes with a problem. “Nobody knows what to pay for it. I mean, it’s wood and seeds.” His Mister T portraits are somewhere in a family closet. And the work can suffer a more tragic fate. “They die,” said Melnick, sometimes eaten by mice and bugs.
There’s something poetic about that impermanence, much like sand mandalas that are ceremoniously designed and destroyed. For the humble seed, whether it’s planted or painted, death is a prerequisite of life.