Air Date: Week of August 21, 2009

Dolly Parton, made from seeds and cornhusks. (Moncrief Speaks)

At the Minnesota State Fair, seeds aren't just for planting – they’re used to create works of art. Living on Earth's Bobby Bascomb produced our audio postcard.

Transcript

CURWOOD: In this season of harvest all of that bounty is on display at state fairs across the country – from jams and pies to enormous squash and pumpkins and prize-winning tomatoes. Living on Earth’s Bobby Bascomb attended the Minnesota harvest celebration in St. Paul last year and encountered an unusual art display. She has this audio postcard.

[MUSIC: David Grissman & Jerry Garcia “Grateful Dog from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

RUSSELL: My name is Beth Russell. I am from Western Minnesota. All of the artwork that you see on the wall is done with seeds from Minnesota farm crops. It has to be grown here. Therefore, white rice doesn't work.

[MUSIC: Jerry Garcia & David Grissman "Grateful Dawg" from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

RUSSELL: So we use wheat and barley, and oats, corn, different varieties of corn, we might have some that looks more yellow, some that's more red. Some of our lentils are green, some are orange. So there's all kinds of colors in the scene. We have beans – kidney beans, lima beans, soy beans.

[MUSIC: Jerry Garcia & David Grissman "Grateful Dawg" from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

RUSSELL: The "founding mother" of crop art from Minnesota – I'm giving her that title – she's called the Seed Queen. She has done Johnny Carson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and if you look at Eleanor Roosevelt in the seed art that Lillian Colton did, Eleanor's teeth are beans, they're great northern beans, which is just phenomenal to me.

[MUSIC: Jerry Garcia & David Grissman "Grateful Dawg" from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

RUSSELL: A typical seed art piece will have somewhere between eight to ten to twelve different kinds of seeds. We ask each one of our artists to come in with what we call a seed chart that tells us the name of the seed and shows us what it is. It's a very important part of the display.

[MUSIC: Jerry Garcia & David Grissman "Grateful Dawg" from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

RUSSELL: One of our categories is wearable art. So I have corn on a chain, dangling from my ears. It's a little zany, a bit of funkiness. A young man last year called me corn ears – it was very appropriate. It's rather distinctive, actually, I get a lot of comments on it. I think it's croppy. I think it looks croppy ... [LAUGHING] ... to go with farm crops.

[MUSIC: Jerry Garcia & David Grissman "Grateful Dawg" from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

CURWOOD: Living on Earth's Bobby Bascomb sent us that audio postcard from last year’s Minnesota State Fair. This year’s event is right around the corner, running from August 27 through Labor Day.

[MUSIC: Jerry Garcia & David Grissman "Grateful Dawg" from The Grateful Dawg Soundtrack (Acoustic Disc 2001)]

CURWOOD: Just ahead – searching for the quiet places of nature in our noisy world. Stay with us on Living on Earth.

 

Links

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