Photo: Marta Shore
Who doesn’t love the crop art display at the Minnesota State Fair? The attention to detail, the artistic ingenuity, the puns! Artist Marta Shore certainly loves the medium. Shore is an award-winning crop artist and educator who has competed in seven different crop art categories and ribboned in six of them. Shore says she loves “both the challenge of figuring out how to do a new technique and the slow meditative process of creating the piece.”
Since becoming the assistant superintendent for Crop Art and Scarecrow at the Minnesota State Fair in 2023, she has decided to no longer compete and instead teach others how to express themselves through crop art. You can find Shore teaching crop art classes around the Twin Cities.
Shore’s goal in her classes is for students to realize that they can learn this unique art form. “I have admired crop art for a long time but was too intimidated to ever start making it,” Shore says. “But when a friend of mine sat down with me and helped me get started a decade ago, I figured out how to break down the process into multiple manageable steps. And that feeling of finishing a piece and seeing it up on the pegboard in the Ag-Hort-Bee building? I want everyone to have that experience.”
Ellie Fuelling is the communications manager at White Bear Center for the Arts. Learn more about classes, programs and events at whitebeararts.org. The Minnesota State Fair starts in late August each year and ends on Labor Day.
