Fansided

An artist/god of chaos from Minnesota makes portrait of Bill Cosby from rapeseed

By Dan Selcke

Undated courtesy photo from Nick Rindo's Facebook page of his crop art portrait of comedian Bill Cosby. It took Rindo just a few hours to throw together the crop art portrait of Cosby. The medium: canola seeds — sometimes (though seldom in the United States) known as rapeseed.It took just a day for the State Fair to give it the boot. After a flurry of complaints by fairgoers about the subject matter and taste, the portrait of the comedian — who has been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women — was pulled from the Agriculture Horticulture Building.“It’s somewhere in a corner of shame,” Rindo said Monday, Aug. 31, 2015. The 37-year-old Richfield artist, a software designer by day, isn’t heartbroken. He was mildly surprised the Fair accepted the submission in the first place. (Courtesy photo)
Undated courtesy photo from Nick Rindo's Facebook page of his crop art portrait of comedian Bill Cosby. It took Rindo just a few hours to throw together the crop art portrait of Cosby. The medium: canola seeds — sometimes (though seldom in the United States) known as rapeseed.It took just a day for the State Fair to give it the boot. After a flurry of complaints by fairgoers about the subject matter and taste, the portrait of the comedian — who has been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women — was pulled from the Agriculture Horticulture Building.“It’s somewhere in a corner of shame,” Rindo said Monday, Aug. 31, 2015. The 37-year-old Richfield artist, a software designer by day, isn’t heartbroken. He was mildly surprised the Fair accepted the submission in the first place. (Courtesy photo) /
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37-year-old Nick Rindo created a portrait of Bill Cosby out of rapeseed and put it on display at the Minnesota State Fair. It didn’t go well.

Nick Rindo, an artist/software designer/wordplay enthusiast from Minneapolis, wasn’t expecting a chance to show off his homemade portrait of Bill Cosby when he submitted it for consideration at the Minnesota State Fair. You see, Rindo constructed the portrait out of canola seeds, also known as rapeseed. Cosby has lately been involved in a little scandal in which he’s been accused of drugging and raping dozens of women, so the portrait had the potential to become a touchy subject. Nevertheless, Ron Kelsey, the Fair’s crop art superintendent, okayed it.

Rindo displayed the Cosby picture alongside a different seed art portrait of deceased Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy. The Nimoy portrait is still on display. The Cosby one: not so much.

Complaints started coming in pretty quickly after the portrait went up—at least one person accused it of being “pro-rape,” while others complained about the subject matter more generally. Rindo didn’t mind, since you don’t make a portrait of Bill Cosby out of rapeseed expecting people to tell you how nice it would look in their living rooms.

“The point was just to see, would there be outrage?” Lindo said, possibly while poking a bear or dropping matches down random mine shafts. “Would there be people talking about it? Would it even get through?”

Lindo took the portrait down a day after he put it on display, after Kelsey consulted with administration and decided a State Fair probably wasn’t the right place to mock an ongoing rape scandal. Incidentally, Lindo included the word “rapeseed” in parenthesis on the portrait’s label to make sure his intent came across. Kelsey put a piece of tape over the word when he approved the picture because “[w]e call everything canola in this country.” He might have spared himself some embarrassment if he’d just rejected the portrait then and there, but then we wouldn’t have gotten to enjoy this story, so everything worked out.

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