Need for seed: a quest for the real Minnesota at the state fair

Since I moved back to Minnesota a few years ago to attend grad school, I’ve been evangelizing to all my transplant friends about the joys of the Minnesota State Fair.

They tend to be skeptical at first, for reasons I find eminently understandable. Yes, I tell them, the fair is a gaudy, tacky place anchored by terrifying carnival rides and gory video feeds of animal surgery and new scientific frontiers in deep-frying. But there’s a parallel fair happening alongside the bacchanalia, I tell them, something more human-scale, something I find moving. I’ll take them to see the rows of perfect cucumbers and tomatillos grown by home gardeners just across from the giant pumpkins in the Agriculture Building, the sunbursts of hand-stitched quilts in the Creative Activities shed, the tiny sculptures twisting against themselves under glass in the red brick fine arts building that looks like an old schoolhouse.

I’ve gotten myself a coterie of regular fairgoers from this tour of things ordinary Minnesotans with leisure time make with their own hands, and the moment that convinced many if not most of those now-regulars was our final stop, back in the Ag Building, to see the seed art.

State Fair seed art (or, per the sign and criteria, crop art, although everyone calls it seed art), if you’re not familiar, is a form of mosaic-making where an image is assembled solely from grains and stems and other little agricultural bits. There’s a category for dyed seeds, but most of my favorite art is executed only in the seed’s natural colors, a narrow band of muted earth tones that can express more subtlety than you might imagine. Each year, the line for seed art stretches nearly out the door of the Ag Building; this year, to try and make things a bit less chaotic, the fair implemented a fast lane/slow lane system so that people who insist on taking photos of every piece aren’t clogging up the queue for everyone else.

It’s the sort of slow, lumbering line that would make anyone skeptical about the reward on the other end, but trust me that the seed art is worth it. You’ll find pop culture references mixed in with photorealistic portraits of celebrities and gorgeous river landscapes and Arts and Crafts Style mosaics of Greek goddesses, each one accompanied by a tag explaining exactly what combination of farro and quinoa and blue corn and soy and anything else came together to make a work of art. The work isn’t monumental in scale or ambition, but it is very often stunningly lovely, particularly after you take some time to consider the sheer amount of labor that went into putting every tiny fleck of organic matter in place.

What tends to surprise my friends most about the seed art, though, is its politics. At least as practiced at the Minnesota State Fair, seed art is a staunchly left-wing art form. At last year’s fair, the walls were filled with art either endorsing Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign or critiquing it from the left. This year, the first thing visitors saw in the display hall was a diptych of text works by different artists, one claiming that Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. (and current Senate candidate) Peggy Flanagan had kicked undocumented immigrants off Medicaid, the other arguing that Walz bore the entire blame for the incident, both understanding that their audiences would naturally think Walz’s actions were indefensible. Even much of the ostensibly non-political art, from a piece celebrating a trans artist's marriage to a copy of a Frog and Toad illustration that’s become a meme among young queer people, evinced a worldview completely opposed to that of modern conservatism. A look at the little white slips of paper next to each piece with the artist’s name and location reveals something else interesting: for an art form so laser-focused on the state’s agriculture sector, a disproportionate number of seed artists are from the deep blue urban splotch of the Twin Cities.

It’s a feature of State Fair seed art that’s surprised every single out-of-towner and transplant I’ve brought to the fair. I also think it’s just about the most quintessentially Minnesotan thing I can imagine.

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The thing about Minnesota is that enough writers and filmmakers and singers and artists are from here that they’ve propagated a very specific version of Minnesota into the popular consciousness. In this cultural Minnesota, the state is one huge corn field peopled largely by white Lutherans with funny accents, an aversion to eye contact, and a profound disdain for anything that departs from a straight white Midwestern Christian norm. Movies like Drop Dead Gorgeous (written by a Minnesotan) dedicate full scenes to spelling out this stereotype; movies like Jennifer’s Body (written by a Minnesotan) assume you know it well enough already to just skip straight ahead to the kids subverting it. Even Fargo (written and directed by two Minnesotans), which may be the best piece of Minnesotan propaganda ever made, relies heavily on this idea; Margie Gunderson’s gorgeous final speech in the squad car requires you to believe in buttoned-up common sense, as embodied by a literal police officer, as a bulwark holding grimy degeneracy at bay. When I read Margie Sarsfield’s (not a Minnesotan, but spent a lot of time here) novel Beta Vulgaris, I was struck by how, even as the book’s flat landscapes and Scandinavian hypocrites could have existed anywhere across the Great Plains, the narrator still punctuates her complaints about the place with fucking Minnesota because, in the American imagination, those things are Minnesota. They’re the stuff you put up with until you can escape.

I’m not about to argue that this stereotype is entirely or even mostly untrue. Minnesota is a largely agrarian state (by land use, not by employment or population) still stippled with plenty of the quiet Norwegian bigot-farmers you see in pop culture. Still, it’s an idea of this place that feels in many ways woefully out of step with the Minnesota I see every day when I leave my apartment.

The Twin Cities, which today are where more than 60 percent of Minnesotans live, have for decades and decades functioned as a beacon for queer people; Minneapolis was the first city in the United States to ban discrimination on the basis of gender identity all the way back in 1975. The first same-sex wedding in the United States happened here in 1971. In recent years, as restrictions on gender-affirming care and abortion care have proliferated in the red and purplish-red states surrounding Minnesota on every side, the Cities have become a place of refuge for those fleeting the GOP’s excesses. I could point you to data backing up this assertion, or I could point you to the fact that my sister, who is much more in touch with the Cities’ queer community than I am, has legitimately dozens of friends who moved to Minnesota for a safer life for themself or their loved ones. I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention that this wave of internal migration to the Cities builds on the same infrastructure and networks of care that has brought Somali and Hmong refugees to build new lives here. Minnesota is a place with many problems, but I think it’s inarguable that it’s come a long way from its pop culture reputation of the place you dream of escaping. These days, it’s more like the place you escape to.

I didn’t escape anywhere to come to Minnesota. I went to high school here, then spent a decade out east, then came back here from a pretty cushy life in Brooklyn for grad school. But, at least for now, I’m staying put. I adore New York, but it’s a place where transplants like myself aren’t supposed to be homesick and also aren’t supposed to pretend to be New Yorkers. You find yourself caught up in this weird depressing in-between space, the opposite of a superposition, neither one thing nor the other when you think you’re kind of supposed to be both. It’s a minor pain, something you learn to put up with over time; still, it never really goes away.

I love that Minnesota doesn’t do that, at least not in the same way. I can’t deny the reality of Minnesota Ice, or the way cold Scandi-American politeness can make it a little tricky to make friends here; I’ve felt it myself, and this place has been some kind of home for me for more than half my life. But I don’t think that negates either the welcome the state has shown to those most in need in recent years or the tenacity with which new Minnesotans have claimed the state’s identity as their own. I live in a very queer, very transplant-heavy neighborhood not far from downtown; every day, I see more Minnesota flags flying from porches and apartment windows. (Those flags, incidentally, are themselves a living symbol of the state’s people rejecting the load-bearing atrocities of the state’s history to create something new and beautiful.) I see it in my friends from grad school from big coastal cities who’ve made the simultaneous decisions to stay in Minneapolis for the cheap rent and great arts community and to become Very Proud Minnesotans, singing the state’s praises at every opportunity. I even see it in the lifelong queer Minnesotans I know who dream of coming back to a place they were told they ought to want to escape.

I see that same spirit in the seed art at the State Fair. It is quintessentially Minnesotan because it is art made with love and labor by people whose lives and politics are at odds with the stereotypes that dog their home and who nonetheless refuse to cede the ground of Minnesota’s symbols and folkways to those same stereotypes. It is joyful and defiant and just silly enough to take seriously. It is a deep and stubborn kind of rootedness: insisting on your right to call a contested land your home, to speak your ideas into its language. It is a form of art that uses the signifiers of calcification to say that better things are actually possible. (Which isn’t that far off from what Fargo is doing, come to think of it.)

This year, near the end of the gallery, there was one piece of seed art that said, simply, “Seed art is anti-capitalist.” My friends and I razzed it a little as we walked by: it’s a nice sentiment, but it’s not as if putting seeds in a mosaic is going to return the means of production to the hands of workers. Still, I’ve been thinking about it. The person who made it didn’t do it for the money; the most a single person can win in prize money from seed art is $30. They, like so many other seed artists around them and before them and after them, presumably made their art for reasons Margie Gunderson would approve of: for the love of where they are, and for the love of what they want that place to keep becoming.

Three Things to Read

As always, here are some things you could read, if you enjoyed reading things. – ESJ

• Chris Thompson and friend-of-the-blog Kelsey McKinney are back at it at Defector, baking the things they're baking on The Great British Bake-off in their home kitchens. Will things turn out well for them? Only one way to find out!
• Elizabeth Sandifer spends another September 11 doing a deep dive on what she calls the worst single comic strip of all time. This year, the history of Barney Google and Snuffy Smith!
• There's been a lot of writing about the killing of conservative commentator/organizer Charlie Kirk, a lot of it very bad, but this Ta-Nehisi Coates piece in Vanity Fair is predictably excellent. It's maybe the only piece you should read on the matter!

A Good Song

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