The Museum of Bad Art, roughly a fifteen-minute walk from the JFK/UMass T station, showcases collections with names like “Poor Traits” and “In the Nood” to all guests for free.
Students can enjoy free or discounted admission at certain museums in the Boston area, including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard Art Museums, and, if you’re taking arts courses, the Institute of Contemporary Art. MOBA isn’t necessarily a museum in that vein, but that may be the point.
“We take ourselves seriously,” Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director Louise Reilly Sacco said. “Just with an amusing collection.”
Sacco characterizes the museum’s philosophy as essentially humane: It values bad art, it doesn’t just make fun of it.
“We celebrate the artists. We’re trying to acknowledge that their effort was worth paying attention to,” she said. “They are works that make you laugh first, but then make you think. Why did anybody paint this? What were they thinking?”
A make-or-break criterion for art submitted to the museum is that it has to be sincere. MOBA isn’t interested in works that were intended to be bad.
“If someone sets out to make bad art, it’s never interesting,” Sacco said. “We get an artist who was creating art, and said, ‘Wow, it didn’t do what I wanted it to do.’ They love the idea of getting an audience for it. We’ll find that audience.”
The museum is run entirely by volunteers, which is part of the reason admission remains free. The museum also has a location in Quebec City, known as the Salon du Bad Art. The Salon is funded in part by public funds, which the Dorchester location isn’t. The Dorchester MOBA makes do with volunteer employees, suggested donations for rejected art they sell, sales from merchandise, and free wall space provided by the Dorchester Brewing Company.
Sacco’s background is in business, not in art. Initially, that was a big part of the reason she was brought on around the time of the museum’s founding in 1994. After some of the founders left, she ascended to Permanent Acting Interim Executive Director.
“It was new, and different, and unique,” she said. “It just sounded like fun, and it’s been fun for 31 years.”
Sacco sees MOBA as providing relief from the seriousness of traditional museums. She considers it a kind of gateway drug for people who haven’t yet been exposed to art.
“If they start with the MFA, young people are likely to be intimidated,” she said. “If they come here first, they have permission to disagree, to laugh, and to think about it in a way that’s much freer.”
Sacco doesn’t think of the museum as being particularly transgressive. There was precedent for people collecting kitsch and paint-by-numbers art before MOBA opened.
“We formalized something that was happening anyway,” she said. She described MOBA’s staff as being part of a larger group of “anti-standards people that celebrate this.”
If any artists want their bad art — made with sincere intentions — displayed, MOBA reviews submissions sent to [email protected].
