I just received the press release that Bad Art? 1,000 Birch Board Pictures from Sweden is coming to Ballard's Nordic Heritage Museum (opening November 30).

The more than 1,000 mixed-media works featured in this visiting exhibition from the Backlund & Håkansson Collection in Sweden represent a ubiquitous form of folk art from unknown origins in northern Europe. Sold as tourist souvenirs for more than a century, these humble objects have spread around the world.

Although these works were made in large numbers — as is apparent in this expansive exhibition — they were not mass produced. Instead, the artists created these pieces individually; typically by gluing postcards to a thin, diagonally sliced pieces of tree trunk — in Sweden, preferably from birches. The postcard images were then hand painted to the edges of the oval slices of wood and sometimes included three-dimensional objects. Early pieces were simply painted landscapes with no postcards.

The pictures selected for this particular exhibition celebrate folk art or vernacular art. The birch board pictures, which were once displayed in private homes, restaurants, gift shops, and cultural clubs have now made their way into museums. Such art tells about aesthetic impulse, creativity, and production, but also about the transition from living culture to heritage.

Interestingly, last Friday on Hyperallergic, Jillian Steinhauer linked to a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Will Gompertz encouraging museums to take their bad art out of storage and show it.

I've had a dream like this for years: the graveyard exhibition is how I've thought of it. A museum lets me take the bad and the damaged art and put it on view before it's discarded in a quiet but formal deaccessions process (there'd be plenty of warning that it's ready to go; these things have to run through official channels). I've asked two museums to do it—Tacoma Art Museum and Seattle Art Museum, but no dice. I find getting rid of art fascinating—when, why, where to. Artists are less precious about it, of course. Lauren Grossman, the Seattle sculptor? She melts down her old cast-iron works to make room in storage for new ones.