Seed artists support marriage equality

I've written here before about seed art at the Minnesota State Fair. Every year, Minnesotans glue thousands of tiny seeds to heavy backing material to create some surprisingly elaborate examples of portraiture and political commentary. Oddly, given that this is folk art at a state fair in the Midwest, most of that political commentary is solidly liberal.

I wasn't able to make it to the Minnesota State Fair this year, but Minnesota Public Radio's Nikki Tundel was there. At least four different entries in this year's seed art competition feature marriage equality themes—responses to the coming election when Minnesotans will decide whether or not to enshrine discriminatory marriage laws into our state constitution. It's safe to say: Minnesota's seed artists want you to vote "No".

You can see all the marriage equality seed art at the MPR News Tumblr blog

Via the Stuff About Minneapolis blog, and Andrew Balfour

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

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MORE: awesome • crop art • Culture • gay marriage • happy mutants • marriage • Marriage Equality • Minnesota • seed art • State Fairs

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grandmapucker

I feel like “seed artist” is some sort of porno euphemism.
jamietie

It shouldn’t be TOO surprising. The upper Midwest, especially Iowa and Minnesota, are really quite progressive as a whole. The crazy conservative bigots are just louder, not more numerous.
- http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
  
  Except where Michelle Bachmann keeps getting re-elected.
  - IronEdithKidd
    
    It couldn’t have been easy carving out a district with enough population, but carefully circumnavigating the Twin Cities almost entirely while still containing a couple burbs and exurbs. And yet, there it is, Minnesota’s 6th.
    - http://twitter.com/trempls tré
      
      I prefer to call it, “home to Pachyderm Studio, recording site of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ and other brilliant records.”
- http://twitter.com/DJ_Solar_Bear Jason Carl
  
  Thank-you. It turns out not everybody in the middle Midwest are assholes, either.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

This is not something I normally think when I look at seed art, but in this case I hope those seeds will sprout.
Brainspore

I like the cause, but are we even sure that’s a same-sex couple? I think lady gnomes have beards too. (Or is that just dwarves?)
- http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch
  
  There aren’t any lady gnomes. Gnomes reproduce through mycelia. Those beards? Not exactly beards. And those smiles hide a dark secret. A secret that has been passed down since before Man walked the Earth.
  
  That’s what the man committed to the insane asylum told me. His eyes were wide as he relived the horror of the gnomes emerging from their non-Euclidean holes as he mumbled, “The eyebrows. Oh, God, the eyebrows!” And then he would speak no more.
  - colin gardner
    
    Clearly you are as ignorant of gnome physiology as Todd Akin is of female physiology. I would direct you to Wil Huygen’s “Gnomes”, nearly 30 years later it is still the last word in serious fact based gnome research.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=653689166 Alana Suskin

Minnesota has a great and long liberal history. You couldn’t pay me to live anywhere that cold, but check it out. Those folks had some serious economic critique going on.