You're listening to an I-Heart podcast.

And we're back with our American stories.

And up next, a story about an art museum in Somerville, Massachusetts.

But this art museum has a bit of a twist. Here's Louise Riley Sacco with this story.

I'm Louise Riley Sacco, and I'm the permanent acting interim executive director of the Museum

of Bad Art. In 1993, Scott Wilson, an arts and antiques dealer,

noticed a framed picture leaning against a trash barrel waiting for the collection truck to come by.

The painting is a woman in a field of flowers, and the wind seems to be blowing the flowers one way in her clothes a different

direction. She's either sitting in a chair or standing. That's unclear. And the sky is yellow. It is a

very compelling painting, but it's puzzling. Scott really liked the frame, and he was planning to throw out the

painting, clean up the frame and sell it. But his friends, Jerry Riley and Mari Jackson, told

him, you can't throw that out. It's so bad, it's good. And they hung it in their house. And that

that was the start of this whole thing. After that, Scott and other friends kept an eye out for really bad paintings in thrift stores,

yard sales, things like that.

And this collection kind of took on a life of its own.

Jerry and Mari had a party.

What it was was a housewarming party and we had hung the paintings

in around their basement and put up descriptions next to each one, narratives just explaining

what we saw in the pieces. And it was going to be a one-time event and then it just never stopped.

The next morning we decided that we needed to keep this going and continue the Museum of Bad Art, never dreaming in 1993 that this would still be going

today. And it took a while and some talking and figuring on how to do that. And one of the moments that I always remember

is we had a, there were five of us early on. And we had a time when we were kind of saying,

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