Chrissy Loffredo brought her four children from
Wellington to golf at Putt’n Around in Delray Beach.
Photos by Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen. This way, kids. Pick up a putter. Grab a golf ball. This is no hands-off, stand-back-and-admire-the-art exhibit. This is pure hands-on and come-out-swingin’, courtesy of the Boca Raton Museum of Art and its mid-summer show, Big Art: Miniature Golf.
The show teed off on July 17 and plays through Oct. 7. So there’s plenty of time left to put on your game face.
Let’s start with Hole No. 1. It’s called “Tiger Woods.” See how the ball rolls across the artificial turf, up the ramp and plops — with luck? with skill? — in to the wide-open mouth of the tiger? See how the backdrop is made of wood slats? A tiger. And wood. Good one. Now, mark your score card and move along to the next challenge.
Artist Erika Nelson of Lucas, Kan., designed
The World’s Smallest Version of the World’s Largest
Miniature Golf Course.
See, here’s the idea: Artists from across the United States competed to design playable miniature golf holes. The 11 winners, culled from among 250 entries, are on display and open for business — “a unique exhibition that explores the fusion between art, design and play” in museum-speak.
Miami-based artist Sri Prabha thinks he played mini-golf, at least once, as a child. “Probably in Orlando,” he says. “I don’t remember it.” But when friend and fellow artist Charles Falarara told him about the design competition, Prabha was instantly gung-ho. The result: an artistic partnership and mini-golf Hole No. 4, “Golf in the Swamp with John Muir,” a nod to the 19th-century naturalist’s book about his trek from Indiana to Florida, A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf.
“I literally wanted to bring nature back into the building,” Prabha says of the Florida-map “fairway” complete with recessed Lake Okeechobee and alligator-mouth hole. Listen carefully and you can hear birds twittering, thanks to an audio component.
A detail of Erika Nelson’s The World’s Smallest Version
of the World’s Largest Miniature Golf Course.
Prabha and Falarara share an interest in ecology and find artistic inspiration in the ocean. They initially submitted a design sketch; a more detailed work-up followed once the field was winnowed down for round two. “It took about three months to make this thing and three days to install it.”
“It was about us being able to collaborate … and a desire to get into a museum,” Falarara says candidly.
Game goes way back
The desire to break into the museum world is nothing new. Nor is the desire to sink a small, round, dimpled, white ball into a 4¼-inch-diameter hole. The earliest, and most elementary, game of golf is generally attributed to the Scots, circa 15th century (though even that game may have been borrowed from stick-and-ball games played in France and Germany in the Middle Ages).
Miniature golf is newer but hardly new, dating back to the 1800s and the Ladies Putting Club at Scotland’s St. Andrews course. Mini-golf came to the U.S. early in the 20th century, where its popularity has waxed and waned over the years, gaining great numbers of enthusiasts during the Great Depression when mini-golf was cheaper than the movies.
The 1950s saw another uptick in popularity and then, after years of ho-hum interest, mini-golf enjoyed another revival in the ’90s.
August 2010 welcomed the arrival, in Delray Beach, of Putt’n Around, two 18-hole mini-courses (“The Everglades” and “The Ocean”) that feature food-and-beverage delivery to every hole, spray-misters to help combat the heat-and-humidity factor and a clubhouse that boasts ice cream and snacks, wine and beer, a/c and apparel.
“It’s meant to be a garden where you play miniature golf,” says owner Elise Johnson — and the response, she says, “has been amazing. Our biggest difficulty is people not knowing we’re here. Once somebody comes, they come back.”
That translates to between 50 and 500 mini-golfers a day, depending on the weather and whatever other events are competing for attention.
The impetus to open Putt’n Around grew out of Delray’s First Night, back in 2005, when Johnson and her husband and their two children — then ninth- and 11th-graders — were in town visiting. “We saw all the people lined up to play the portable mini-golf, and we decided that Delray needed a mini-golf course. There was nothing for our kids to do after dinner, other than galleries or bars, and that just wasn’t appropriate.”
A little more than eight miles south of Putt’n Around is Boomers! Boca Raton, a family-fun venue that offers bumper boats, batting cages, bowling, a rock wall, go-carts, a game room, laser tag . . . oh, and a mini golf course that boasts “lush greens, wild water features and wacky windmills.”
Like Putt’n Around, Boomers! provides the putter and the ball, customers provide the skill and the will to win.
The Boca Raton Museum show Big Art: Miniature Golf
includes such works as Trapped in Paradise,
by artist Robert Reed of Honolulu.
Game comes alive here
So mini-golf came to Delray and Boca, and its approximation came to the Boca Museum where, on a recent evening, one guy’s trying to play Hole No. 2, “Trapped in Paradise,” with its straw mats and host of inflatables — flamingos and palm trees and sharks and monkeys — and a zigzagged-corridor course that resists efforts to sink the ball.
Then there’s one that sticks an obstacle immediately in front of the hole, which may lead visitors to wonder if the artist is making a statement about competition or frustration or happenstance or unfairness or golf handicap or, maybe, if they simply didn’t know or care about getting the @#$%! ball into the @#$%! hole.
Hole No. 10 — “The Life Hole” — is straightforwardly sly, with floor-level screens (think Magic 8 Ball) that offer think-lines: “What’s beyond par?” and “Do you live for a better hole?” and “You have a nice putt.”
There are others with varying degrees of playability from pretty easy to not bad to utterly impossible. But then, that probably sums up the game of golf. To a tee.
If you go
Big Art: Miniature Golf — Through Oct. 7 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Mizner Park, Boca Raton. Phone: 392-2500. On the web: bocamuseum.org
Putt’n Around — 350 NE Fifth Ave. (Federal Highway), Delray Beach. Phone: 450-6162. On the web: puttnaround.net
Boomers! Boca Raton — 3100 Airport Road, Boca Raton. Phone: 347-1888.
On the web: boomersparks.com/site/boca
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