The State Fair is months away, but crop artists are getting ready

A frigid Minnesota night, a glass of beer and small paper plates filled with many, many seeds. To make a crop art masterpiece, that’s all you need ― and an incredible amount of patience.

At the second monthly Crop Art Wednesday meetup Dec. 17 at St. Paul’s Lake Monster Brewing Co., about a dozen aspiring and longtime crop artists mingled and mixed seeds.

“I just love this community so much, and I just wanted to find a way to hang out with them,” said Marta Shore, assistant superintendent for Crop Art and Scarecrow at the Minnesota State Fair and a lecturer in biostatistics and health data science at the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health.

There’s an annual crop art competition at the Minnesota State Fair, and artists must submit work in early August. But what about the many months in-between? Shore hopes the monthly meetup, which takes place on the third Wednesday of each month, will solve that problem.

“There’s like one month out of the year we’re tight ― we talk to each other every day,” Shore said. “And then 11 months of the year we barely interact.”

The brewery was packed. Patrons sipped beer at wooden tables, and pizza deliveries popped in from nearby OG Zaza. A noisy crowd at a climate action event gathered in back. Up front, crop artists chatted and seeded.

Four students from the Master of Public Health in Epidemiology program at the U carefully placed green split peas onto an enlarged drawing of E. coli.

The students had considered making hepatitis C virus, COVID-19 or measles.

Chris Roberts, 22, used a tweezer to gingerly pick up an orange lentil. “I’ve got to put more glue on it,” he said.

Although he’d grown up in Minnesota, he’d never tried making crop art before.

“It’s like bedazzling,” Chalmers said of crop art.

“My girlfriend talks about bedazzling all the time,” Roberts said.

When asked if they’ll submit it to the State Fair, they looked up from the E. coli and smiled.

“We’re all in,” Skaggs proclaimed.

At another table, a group of seasoned crop artists yapped away while working on colorful crop art works.

Sarah O’Brien, 43, placed blue-painted millet seeds onto the outline of a chicken from the video game Stardew Valley. She moved here from Nashville in 2012.

“When I moved to Minnesota I was told to go see the crop art, and I was like, ‘That is so cool, I want to do that,’” O’Brien said. “But it took me a few years to actually jump in.”

“Crop art is not just a fun community, it’s also meditative,” Myers said. “You sort of just zone in. I feel my blood pressure go down when I do it.”

Lori Anderson, 67, quietly traced a drawing of a ukulele onto paper. Her bright blue eyes glowed as she examined her fellow crop artists’ seeds.

“Crop art people, we love to talk about crop art,” Anderson said. “I could talk about it forever.”

Anderson pondered her crop artwork for next year. She plays the ukulele and wondered if she could get a used or broken ukulele off Facebook Marketplace. She could decorate it with seeds for a State Fair crop art entry, or submit a two-dimensional version of ukulele crop art. Or both!

As the artists talked, ideas literally kept cropping up.

Gayle Deutsch, 61, knitted a bright yellow sweater for her mom as she watched others create crop art. Annmarie Geniusz, 45, sketched crop artist O’Brien.

As the evening wore on, crop artists ordered second beers, the crowd start thinning out, and chatter dropped to a low hum.

Anderson and Geniusz popped over to see the E. coli crop art. It was slowly coming together.

“I thought it was a flying corn dog,” Geniusz admitted.