History
The Museum of Bad Art began in the early 1990s after a discarded painting inspired its founders to showcase art that is “so bad it should not be ignored.”
History
Founding and Early Origins
The Museum of Bad Art was founded by antique dealer Scott Wilson, who discovered what has become the museum's signature piece—Lucy in the Field with Flowers—protruding from between two trash cans on a Roslindale-area curb in Boston, among some garbage waiting to be collected. Wilson was initially interested only in the frame, but when he showed the picture to his friend Jerry Reilly, the latter wanted both the frame and the painting. He exhibited Lucy in his home, and encouraged friends to look for other bad art and notify Wilson of what they found. When Wilson acquired another "equally lovely" piece and shared it with Reilly, they decided to start a collection. Reilly and his wife, Marie Jackson, held a party in their basement to exhibit the collection to date, and hosted a reception they facetiously titled "The Opening of the Museum of Bad Art".
Early Expansion and the Dedham Location
Regular showings of the pieces collected by Wilson, Reilly, and Jackson (and those donated by others), became too much for Reilly and Jackson's small home in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, as hundreds of people attended the receptions. The founders' initial attempt at dealing with their constrained exhibition space was to create the Virtual Museum Of Bad Art, a CD-ROM with a cast of 95 people that presented the MOBA art collection in a fictional imaginary museum. This fictional MOBA allowed the visitors not only to view the paintings but to go behind the scenes in the fictional museum.
The MOBA was officially founded in 1993, and its first exhibition was presented in March 1994.
Word of the museum's collection continued to spread until, according to "Permanent Interim Acting Director" Louise Reilly Sacco, "it got completely out of hand" when a group of senior citizens on a tour bus stopped to see it. In 1995, the display space was moved to the basement of the Dedham Community Theatre, a building with an aesthetic described in 2004 as "ramshackle". The museum in Dedham had no fixed operating hours, instead being open while the theater upstairs was open. As The Boston Globe notes, the art collection was appropriately placed "just outside the men's room", where sounds and smells carry to the collection and the constant flushing of the toilet "supposedly helps maintain a uniform humidity", according to the South China Morning Post.
Exhibitions and Traveling Shows
In MOBA's early days, the museum hosted traveling shows; on one occasion the works were hung from trees in the woods on Cape Cod for the "Art Goes Out the Window—The Gallery in the Woods". Bad music was played during the public viewings to complete the ambiance. In an exhibition titled "Awash in Bad Art", 18 pieces of art were covered in shrink wrap for "the world's first drive-thru museum and car wash". Marie Jackson, formerly the Director of Aesthetic Interpretation noted, "We didn't put any watercolors in there." A 2001 exhibition, "Buck Naked—Nothing But Nudes" featured all of the MOBA nudes hung in a local spa.
MOBA features its works in rotating collections. In 2003, "Freaks of Nature" focused on landscape artwork "gone awry". A 2006 exhibit titled "Hackneyed Portraits" was designed to "pick up some of the slack" when the David Hockney show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts closed. MOBA unveiled its show "Nature Abhors a Vacuum and All Other Housework" in 2006; this format continues on the museum's website.
Later Expansions, Closures, and Reopenings
A second gallery opened in 2008 at the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square, Somerville, Massachusetts, where the collection was placed near both the women's and men's restrooms. Although the original gallery was free and open to the public, the second is free with admission to the theater or with a pass requested from the museum. Exhibitions titled "Bright Colors / Dark Emotions" and "Know What You Like / Paint How You Feel" have been held in the academic gallery at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. One of MOBA's goals is "to take bad art on the road", according to Sacco. Pieces from MOBA's collection have been on display in museums in New York City, Ottawa, Taipei, and Virginia.
In February 2009, MOBA announced a fundraiser to assist the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, which was seriously considering whether to sell masterpieces because of the 2008 financial crisis, made worse for the university by some of its donors losing money in the Madoff investment scandal. Current MOBA curator Michael Frank placed Studies in Digestion—a four-panel piece showing four renditions of the human digestive tract in various media by artist Deborah Grumet—on eBay for a buy-it-now price of $10,000; the first bid was $24.99. It eventually sold for $152.53 and the meager proceeds went to the Rose Art Museum, while both museums gained publicity.
In 2010, the museum opened a third location in the offices of the Brookline Interactive Group.
In December 2012, the branch at the Dedham Community Theater closed to convert the space into a screening room. Another branch later opened at the New England Wildlife Center in South Weymouth. The Somerville location was closed in 2019 when theater owners sought to renovate the basement space it occupied. All locations closed after the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The museum reopened at the Dorchester Brewing Company's tap room in Boston in September 2022.
