Bryan, Susanne and Nicola Carpenter’s Garden Gnome Foosball hole combines traditional kitsch garden ornaments with table top soccer to create a twist on gameplay.
Carefully putt your golf ball around two massive wheelbarrows and then, using lifesize foosball players dressed as garden gnomes, guide the ball down the green and into the hole. This set of obstacles, designed by artists Bryan, Susanne, and Nicola Carpenter, is one of 15 playful, funny, and even interactive holes constructed for this year’s mini-golf course in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center. Titled “Walker on the Green,” the course is open through September 8, and local artists and architects conceived each hole.
Some of the most distinctive submissions call for interaction that goes beyond just tapping the ball. Be a Sculpture!, another hole created by the Carpenters along with artist Sean Donovan, requires participants to pose like their favorite statue while their opponents putt around and between them. In Roaming Hole Gardens by artist collective Makesh!t, players can create their own obstacles by relocating artificial shrubs and trees—and they can even move the hole itself.
For Chris Larson’s Mega Golf, players enter a golf ball–shaped dome and putt through a model of the Walker Art Center.
COURTESY WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS.
Other contributions more directly reflect “the spirit of a classic mini-golf course,” says the project’s curator, Scott Stulen. “Can You Handle This?” by Tom Loftus and Robin Schwartzman has golfers putt the ball through the handle and spout of an oversize yellow watering can. And game play takes place inside a gigantic golf ball in Mega Golf, one of two holes designed by Chris Larson and his art students at the University of Minnesota.
Mixing sculptures, structures, and landscapes, this course offers a new way to go green this summer.
