Museum of Bad Art Brings Worst Art to Widest Audience

Boston is home to some of the world’s most beautiful works of art, including the celebrated collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. But just outside the city there’s an art institution of a very different sort. For more than 20 years, the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) has been dedicated to presenting the best in bad art. The museum bills itself as “the world’s only museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, exhibition, and celebration of bad art in all its forms.” A recent visit to the museum’s Brookline gallery (other locations are Somerville and South Weymouth, Mass.) confirms the boast. The installations are often hilarious, the captions so tongue-in-cheek they’re laugh-out-loud funny.

Museum of Bad Art founder Scott Wilson launched the project after rescuing a painting, Lucy in the Field with Flowers, from between two garbage cans on a Roslindale sidewalk. After collecting a few other terrible pieces, in 1994 he opened the first MOBA in the basement of a West Roxbury house. Public interest and word of mouth led to the creation of a gallery in the basement of the Dedham Community Theater, where the growing collection resided until 2008, when it moved to a basement space in the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square, “conveniently located just outside the men’s room.” The museum also has galleries in the offices of the Brookline Interactive Group and at the New England Wildlife Center in South Weymouth.

MOBA’s collection currently totals about 600 pieces, but only a fraction are on display at any given time. The museum’s website notes that it is “only through the efforts of the worldwide Friends of MOBA that we have been able to carry out our mission: to bring the worst of art to the widest audience.” All submissions must pass through a rigorous review process (i.e., no children’s art or factory-made tourist pieces are considered). After a piece is accepted, the museum adds proper identification, including title, artist (if known), method of acquisition, and a humorous interpretation to complete the experience for patrons.

MOBA’s collection can be viewed on its website, but trust us when we tell you that you can only fully appreciate the true magnitude of these masterpieces in person. Sunday on the Pot with George, a favorite, has been hailed as iconic by the Boston Globe, which also wrote that the work is “100 percent guaranteed to make you burst out laughing.”

The Museum of Bad Art’s three galleries in Massachusetts: MOBA Brookline Gallery, 46 Tappan St., Brookline, open Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; free admission; Somerville Theatre MOBA Gallery, 55 Davis Square, Somerville, open during concerts or when movies are being screened; free admission with purchase of a movie or concert ticket; find a schedule of current shows here; MOBA New England Wildlife Center Gallery, 500 Columbian St., South Weymouth, open Monday and Wednesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Tuesday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sunday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; free admission. Find directions to all galleries here.

Learn how to donate “really, REALLY bad art” to MOBA’s collection here.

Connor Lenahan can be reached at Lenahan@bu.edu.