The Story of the Only Museum Dedicated to Bad Art

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Shop now for family favorites. And we're back with Our American Stories. And up next, a story about an art museum in Somerville, Massachusetts. But this art museum has a bit of a twist.

Here's Louise Riley Sacco with the story. I'm Louise Riley Sacco, and I'm the permanent acting interim executive director of the Museum of Bad Art. In 1993, Scott Wilson, an arts and antiques dealer, noticed a framed picture leaning against a trash barrel waiting for the collection truck to come by. The painting is a woman in a field of flowers, and the wind seems to be blowing. The flowers one way and her clothes a different direction. She's either sitting in a chair or standing. That's unclear.

And the sky is yellow. It is a very compelling painting, but it's puzzling. Scott really liked the frame, and he was planning to throw out the painting, clean up the frame, and sell it. But his friends, Jerry Riley and Mari Jackson, told him, you can't throw that out.

It's so bad it's good. And they hung it in their house. And that was the start of this whole thing. After that, Scott and other friends kept an eye out for really bad paintings in thrift stores, yard sales, things like that. And this collection kind of took on a life of its own.

Jerry and Mari had a party. What it was was a housewarming party. And we had hung the paintings around their basement and put up descriptions next to each one, narratives just explaining what we saw in the pieces.

And it was going to be a one-time event. And then it just never stopped. The next morning, we decided that we needed to keep this going and continue the Museum of Bad Art, never dreaming in 1993 that this would still be going today.

And it took a while and some talking and figuring on how to do that. And one of the moments that I always remember is there were five of us early on. And we had a time when we were kind of saying, wait a minute, is this just the five of us who think this is interesting? Maybe there is no wider audience for it. Someone had the insight that if you're walking past an art gallery with a group of people and someone says, wow, look at that, until you turn around and look, you don't know if it's going to be really bad or really good.

But either way, there's this instinct to share it and talk about it and have fun with it. And we decided we needed to be the people to plug into that. People in the early days just left the art or mailed it to us. And we ended up with a lot that we didn't want because we do have standards.

And our standards are pretty basic. One thing is it's got to be art. And to us, that means it needs to be sincere and original and somebody trying to make an artistic statement of some sort. But something went wrong in a way that makes it interesting, compelling, worth talking about.

We don't collect kitsch. There's no velvet paintings, no big-eyed children or dogs playing poker, none of that, no paint by numbers. And it just has to be that our curator, Michael, that Mike feels like something went wrong. It can be a very skilled artist who's trying something new or who just missed something and it got messed up or, for instance, selected a topic that just didn't lend itself to painting. Or it could be someone who barely knows which end of the paintbrush to pick up. The heart, soul is there and they just didn't have the skills to pull it off.

The sincerity is apparent. People try to make a piece to get into our museum and you can usually see right through it that this was someone just trying to make something bad. That doesn't have the appeal of a sincere work. We have almost 800 pieces all together.

We've never had room to show more than 25 or 30 at a time. But a couple of my favorites from over the years, there's a piece called Sunday on the Pot with George. It's a pointillist piece. And I'm not an artist, but from what I understand, pointillism is hard, you know, all those little tiny dots to make an image. And this image is a portly man sitting apparently on a toilet with a towel draped over him. And as we say, the artist ran out of canvas before he got to the feet.

The feet are not shown. It's a big piece. And all these little dots of paint and all the thought that goes into it, why would you do spend all that effort on this subject, a portly man sitting on a toilet?

I mean, it's just baffling. So I love that one for that reason. Another one I'm very fond of is called Sensitive. It's a small yellow piece and heavy black letters say sensitive, going in different directions. But it's this big sort of insensitive, sensitive. And there's a little cartoon with stick figures that a man is offering his heart to a woman.

And she takes it and throws it on the ground and stops on it. So it makes me picture a conversation where this man is saying, sensitive, you want sensitive, I'll show you sensitive and paints this insensitive piece with the word sensitive, you know, in black paint across the middle of it. So that I mean, and on that piece, one of the things that makes it so appealing is there's so much emotion in this.

It will never, you know, be shown in a fine art, traditional art museum. But the heart and soul really shows through. We can relate to it. You can't imagine yourself, most of us can't imagine ourselves doing even a Banksy piece, never mind a Raphael or, you know, a Picasso. But we can imagine ourselves making these attempts and having something go wrong. And we can imagine ourselves doing something else, making these attempts and having something go wrong.

And that's fun. It's also fun to look at a piece and really think about what's wrong with it. What is going on in this painting? And it raises the same questions that fine art raises, you know, why was this created? What was in the artist's mind?

What alternatives might they have used? The parallels to fine art are immense. I grew up in Boston, less than a mile from the Museum of Fine Arts.

And on rainy days, we would go hang out there. So from the time I was 10 years old, I was around a lot of, you know, very famous, wonderful art. And some of the same responses I have to things in the Museum of Fine Arts I have to things in the Museum of Bad Art. But we never have called a museum on it and said, you know, this is really not that good.

It's up to the curators of each museum to decide on their own. But the idea that we have to decide that this is bad and this is good is maybe not useful. You know, am I enjoying looking at this?

And does it make me happy or make me think or well, then don't worry about what the label is. I mean, I laugh a little bit at the popularity of Thomas Kinkade and his paintings of light, but there are people who think they're wonderful. And there's no reason that I want to stop them from thinking that, you know, if you think that that's wonderful, then enjoy it.

Share it, you know, tell your friends about it. Who gets to say what's good and what's bad? It's unclear who or why in some cases. One of the values that we have brought, I think, to some audiences is that when people come into the Museum of Bad Art, they feel perfectly free to disagree with us.

And that's fine. But they ought to be doing that everywhere. You know, traditional museums often intimidate people. How dare you disagree with what the Metropolitan Museum of Art thinks belongs on the wall?

It's hard to do. But we, you know, with us, you can disagree. We've had fun.

That's huge. We've had a lot of fun. And we've learned that a lot of the ideas about art that we've had are universal. We have followers all over the world. We've learned that artists are not, as we feared at the start, worried about having their piece in a Museum of Bad Art because artists want someone to see their work.

They want attention. And we've learned that sometimes a fairly ridiculous idea can have legs and can continue and grow. And a special thanks to Monty for the production on that piece and for the storytelling. And a special thanks to Madison for her work on the interview.

And thanks to Louise Riley Sacco. And you can reach Louise and the Museum of Bad Art at museumofbadart.org to find out more about the museum. By the way, if you're trying to get in, don't try and deliberately make it into the Museum of Bad Art.

They'll figure you out. It's just got to be art that had a good intention, but something went wrong. By the way, I love the logo on the Museum of Bad Art's website. It says, art too bad to be ignored.

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