Museum of Bad Art
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 MOBA's location
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| Established | 1994 |
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| Location |
Dedham, Massachusetts (former; closed 2012) Somerville, Massachusetts Brookline, Massachusetts South Weymouth, Massachusetts |
| Coordinates | 42°14′53″N 71°10′23″W / 42.248026°N 71.172969°W |
| Type | Art museum |
| Director | Louise Reilly Sacco |
| Curator | Michael Frank |
| Public transit access | Somerville Gallery: MBTA Red Line Davis Station |
| Website | www.museumofbadart.org |
The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) is a privately owned museum whose stated aim is "to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum". It was originally located in Dedham with current branches in Somerville, Brookline, and South Weymouth in Massachusetts. Its permanent collection includes 500 pieces of "art too bad to be ignored", 25 to 35 of which are on public display at any one time.
MOBA was founded in 1994, after antique dealer Scott Wilson showed a painting he had recovered from the trash to some friends, who suggested starting a collection. Within a year, receptions held in Wilson's friends' home were so well-attended that the collection needed its own viewing space. The museum then moved to the basement of a theater in Dedham. Explaining the reasoning behind the museum's establishment, co-founder Jerry Reilly said in 1995: "While every city in the world has at least one museum dedicated to the best of art, MOBA is the only museum dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the worst." To be included in MOBA's collection, works must be original and have serious intent, but they must also have significant flaws without being boring; curators are not interested in displaying deliberate kitsch.
MOBA has been mentioned in dozens of off-the-beaten-path guides to Boston, featured in international newspapers and magazines, and has inspired several other collections throughout the world that set out to rival its own visual atrocities. Deborah Solomon of The New York Times Magazine noted that the attention the Museum of Bad Art receives is part of a wider trend of museums displaying "the best bad art". The museum has been criticized for being anti-art, but the founders deny this, responding that its collection is a tribute to the sincerity of the artists who persevered with their art despite something going horribly wrong in the process. According to co-founder Marie Jackson, "We are here to celebrate an artist's right to fail, gloriously."
The Museum of Bad Art was established in 1994 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, Reilly 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".
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Wikipedia