Antiques dealer Scott Wilson spends a lot of time fishing through thrift stores and junk sales around Boston and comes across a lot of really awful art. A couple of years ago, Wilson found a gem of a bad piece and brought it over to his friend Jerry Reilly's house in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. The huge oil painting was titled Lucy in the Field with Flowers. It was "a beautiful painting of an old lady with blue hair, standing - almost hovering - in a field of daisies," recalls Wilson.
"There was something about it that was just hideous," says Reilly, a computer programmer, "but in a really striking way. It's breathtakingly bad. You could tell that the person who painted it was technically proficient, but something had gone horribly wrong."
Reilly, who spends every summer in Cape Cod living in a tent full of computers with his screenwriter wife, asked Wilson if he could hang Lucy in his home. Wilson gladly accepted. "I started giving him more and more bad paintings," he says. Nine months later, Reilly had so many horrible paintings in his house, he and Wilson decided to share their collection with the public. "I turned my basement into a museum," Reilly explains. "We painted the walls white, added track lighting, framed the paintings, wrote little blurbs for them, and called it the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA). Then we invited a pile of people over. That was the start of it all."
It didn't end there, of course. Reilly and Wilson had more shows, each with new pieces Wilson had rescued from yard sales, thrift stores, flea markets, attics, and trash cans. As MOBA's curator, Wilson is very particular about what gets hung on the walls. You won't see velvet Elvis paintings or intentionally primitive "folk" art. "We don't go for kitsch," he explains. "The paintings are all inspired, genuine attempts at something. There's a lot of passion in them, but something ran amok. As a result, they need to be seen." Thus, MOBA's motto: "Art too bad to be ignored."
Reilly's suburban home quickly became the hip local hangout of West Roxbury, attracting mobs of people on show nights. Strangers began donating paintings they'd found. MOBA's last show in January, "Bright Colors/Dark Emotions," was a complete zoo. "It's a small house, and there were hundreds of people," Reilly says. "We'd put paintings on the whole outside of our house, and it was so crowded you couldn't get in. We hit the limit."
At that point, it was no longer practical to keep the museum in Reilly's basement. A meeting was called with the Friends of MOBA (a loose connection of 80 or so of the museum's hard-core fans) to figure out what to do. They came up with two plans. First, they decided to set up temporary MOBAs in larger galleries and museums around town. They also started making a CD-ROM. The friends of MOBA began pitching in. One member put them in contact with a photographer's studio in Boston. Another who owns a small software business agreed to help distribute the CD-ROM through her company. Somebody else is a film producer, so she brought in costumes and props. The CD-ROM is full of chatty, outrageous characters (played by the Friends of MOBA). You can visit the lobby, café, restroom, and gift shop, or sneak past the "No Admittance" signs to explore the offices, shipping dock, and restoration rooms. "Other art CD-ROMs we've seen are sterile - a bunch of empty rooms with paintings," says Reilly. "Half the fun of going to a real museum is eavesdropping on people."
What is it about bad art that has made MOBA a success? Reilly has a theory: "Because it's the Museum of Bad Art, people aren't afraid to give their opinion. In fact, they talk passionately about the art. You never see that in a regular museum." MOBA: +1 (781) 444 6757. On the Web: www.museumofbadart.org/.
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