As part of the
redevelopment at the Schmidt Brewery site, Blue Ox Mini Golf is leveraging a $350,000 grant from
ArtPlace America and the proceeds from an ongoing GiveMN campaign to fund its new course on West 7th Street. The course sits amid the site’s
260 residential units and multiple commercial spaces, all of which are part of a $120 million project that’s wrapping up early this summer.
The course “will add art each year in the form of new holes, amenities and supplemental programming,” according to the Blue Ox website. All will be designed and installed by local artists. The course’s permanent features are also artist-designed, creating “multiple points of entry for everyone from committed art-ophiles to the random passerby on the way to the bus stop.”
Blue Ox is taking a page from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which has constructed several art- and architecture-focused mini golf courses in the past 10 years. Like its St. Paul counterpart, the Walker’s
Artist-Designed Mini Golf regularly incorporates new artist-commissioned holes, examples of which include a foosball area replete with garden gnomes and a “gopher hole vortex.”
Although Artist-Designed Mini Golf is only open during the warm season—May 22 through September 1 this year—its most popular holes enjoy permanent status amid the newcomers. Blue Ox, which will shut down each fall and reopen in late spring, will also recycle perennially popular holes.
The similarities between Blue Ox and the Walker’s course aren’t accidental: Blue Ox’s Christi Atkinson previously served as the Walker’s course director, and Jennifer Pennington, the initiative’s marketing director, is married to the designer of one of the Walker’s most engaging holes. The Walker’s current Sculpture Garden course’s $12 or $18 tickets (for 9 and 18 holes, respectively) include free admission to the museum. This has been a winning formula, with long waits for tee times on weekends and nice evenings.
The St. Paul course presents an additional design challenge thanks to strict historic preservation guidelines to which future artists will be beholden. Each hole has to incorporate themes or design elements that harken back to the brewery that once occupied the site.
Blue Ox doesn’t have a world-class art museum to keep golf-averse family members occupied, although the as-yet-unnamed restaurant tenant of the site’s soon-to-be-renovated keg house could keep visitors fed and watered.
But Blue Ox does double the number of artist-commissioned mini golf holes in the Twin Cities, providing visibility and recognition for installation artists in St. Paul. And as the entertainment centerpiece of the Schmidt redevelopment, the course promises to draw families and local residents who previously sped by the disused site on their way to downtown St. Paul or the airport.