May 6, 2025 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, most museums showcase the finer things in history, culture, and the arts—but not the aptly named Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) in Boston, Massachusetts, where you’ll find masterpieces like A Mariachi in Tiananmen Square, Sunday on the Pot With George, and Self-Portrait as a Bird. Louise Reilly Sacco, the museum’s curator, shares the tale of how it all came to be.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we're back with our American stories. And up next
a story about an art museum in Somerville, Massachusetts. At
this art museum has a bit of a twist. Here's
Louise Riley Sacho with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm Louise Riley Sacho and I'm the permanent, acting interim
executive director of the Museum of Bad Art. In nineteen
ninety three, Scott Wilson and arts and antique stealer noticed
a framed picture leaning against a trash barrel waiting for
the collection truck to come by. The painting is a
(00:44):
woman in a field of flowers, and she's the wind
seems to be blowing the flowers one way, in 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
(01:05):
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 Murray Jackson told them, 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
(01:26):
thrift stores, yard sales, things like that, and this collection
kind of took on a life of its own. Jerry
and Maray had a party. What it was was a
housewarming party, and we had hung the paintings in around
their basement and put up descriptions next to each one,
narratives just explaining what we saw in the pieces, and
(01:49):
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 nineteen ninety three
that this would still be going today. And it took
a while and some talking and figuring on how to
(02:10):
do that. And one of the moments that I always
remember is we had 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? You know, maybe there is
no wider audience for it. Someone had the insight that
if you're walking past an art gallery with a group
(02:33):
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
(02:56):
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.
(03:19):
We don't collect kitch. There's no velvet paintings, no big
eyed children, our dogs playing poker, none of that, no
paint by numbers, and it just has to be our curator,
Michael that Mike feels like something went wrong. It can
be a very skilled artist who's trying something new, or
(03:42):
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
and soul is there, and they just didn't have the
skills to pull it off. The sincerity is apparent, you know,
people try to make a piece to get into our museum,
(04:03):
and you can usually see right through it that this
was someone just you know, trying to make something bad
that doesn't have the appeal of a sincere work. We
have almost eight hundred pieces altogether. We've never had room
to show more than twenty five or thirty at a time.
(04:25):
But a couple of my favorites from over the years.
There's a piece called Sunday on the Pot with George.
It's a pointless 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
(04:47):
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
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
(05:10):
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
(05:32):
and throws it on the ground and stomps 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, I mean,
and on that piece. One of the things that makes
(05:52):
it so appealing is there's so much emotion in this.
It will never 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,
(06:12):
never mind a Raphael or a Picasso. But we can
imagine ourselves 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
(06:34):
this created, what was in the artist's mind, what alternatives
might they have used? The parallels to fine art are imments.
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 ten years old, I was around a lot of
you know, very famous, wonderful art, and some of the
(06:59):
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
(07:22):
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 Kincaid and his paintings of light. But there
are people who think they're wonderful, and there's no reason
(07:43):
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? Unclear who or why?
In some cases. One of the values that we have brought,
(08:07):
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
(08:28):
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 our universal. We have followers all
over the world. We've learned that artists are not, as
(08:51):
we feared at the start, worried about having their peace
in a museum of bad art. Because they artists want
someone to see their work. They want, they want attention,
and we've learned that sometimes a fairly ridiculous idea can
have legs and can continue and grow.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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 Saco. And you can reach Louise and
the Museum of Bad Art at the Museumobadart dot org
to find out more about the museum. By the way,
if you're trying to get in, don't try and deliberately
(09:31):
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. The story
of the Museum of Bad Art. Here on our American
Story
And we're back with our American stories. And up next
a story about an art museum in Somerville, Massachusetts. At
this art museum has a bit of a twist. Here's
Louise Riley Sacho with the story.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm Louise Riley Sacho and I'm the permanent, acting interim
executive director of the Museum of Bad Art. In nineteen
ninety three, Scott Wilson and arts and antique stealer noticed
a framed picture leaning against a trash barrel waiting for
the collection truck to come by. The painting is a
(00:44):
woman in a field of flowers, and she's the wind
seems to be blowing the flowers one way, in 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
(01:05):
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 Murray Jackson told them, 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
(01:26):
thrift stores, yard sales, things like that, and this collection
kind of took on a life of its own. Jerry
and Maray had a party. What it was was a
housewarming party, and we had hung the paintings in around
their basement and put up descriptions next to each one,
narratives just explaining what we saw in the pieces, and
(01:49):
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 nineteen ninety three
that this would still be going today. And it took
a while and some talking and figuring on how to
(02:10):
do that. And one of the moments that I always
remember is we had 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? You know, maybe there is
no wider audience for it. Someone had the insight that
if you're walking past an art gallery with a group
(02:33):
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
(02:56):
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.
(03:19):
We don't collect kitch. There's no velvet paintings, no big
eyed children, our dogs playing poker, none of that, no
paint by numbers, and it just has to be our curator,
Michael that Mike feels like something went wrong. It can
be a very skilled artist who's trying something new, or
(03:42):
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
and soul is there, and they just didn't have the
skills to pull it off. The sincerity is apparent, you know,
people try to make a piece to get into our museum,
(04:03):
and you can usually see right through it that this
was someone just you know, trying to make something bad
that doesn't have the appeal of a sincere work. We
have almost eight hundred pieces altogether. We've never had room
to show more than twenty five or thirty at a time.
(04:25):
But a couple of my favorites from over the years.
There's a piece called Sunday on the Pot with George.
It's a pointless 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
(04:47):
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
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
(05:10):
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
(05:32):
and throws it on the ground and stomps 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, I mean,
and on that piece. One of the things that makes
(05:52):
it so appealing is there's so much emotion in this.
It will never 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,
(06:12):
never mind a Raphael or a Picasso. But we can
imagine ourselves 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
(06:34):
this created, what was in the artist's mind, what alternatives
might they have used? The parallels to fine art are imments.
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 ten years old, I was around a lot of
you know, very famous, wonderful art, and some of the
(06:59):
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
(07:22):
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 Kincaid and his paintings of light. But there
are people who think they're wonderful, and there's no reason
(07:43):
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? Unclear who or why?
In some cases. One of the values that we have brought,
(08:07):
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
(08:28):
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 our universal. We have followers all
over the world. We've learned that artists are not, as
(08:51):
we feared at the start, worried about having their peace
in a museum of bad art. Because they artists want
someone to see their work. They want, they want attention,
and we've learned that sometimes a fairly ridiculous idea can
have legs and can continue and grow.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
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 Saco. And you can reach Louise and
the Museum of Bad Art at the Museumobadart dot org
to find out more about the museum. By the way,
if you're trying to get in, don't try and deliberately
(09:31):
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. The story
of the Museum of Bad Art. Here on our American
Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Intentionally Disturbing
Join me on this podcast as I navigate the murky waters of human behavior, current events, and personal anecdotes through in-depth interviews with incredible people—all served with a generous helping of sarcasm and satire. After years as a forensic and clinical psychologist, I offer a unique interview style and a low tolerance for bullshit, quickly steering conversations toward depth and darkness. I honor the seriousness while also appreciating wit. I’m your guide through the twisted labyrinth of the human psyche, armed with dark humor and biting wit.