St. Paul Saints bring baseball, humor and art to the people

This spring, Major League Baseball debuted new rules designed to pick up the pace of a game notorious for its excessive length and slow play.

Meanwhile, Minnesota's minor league team, the Lowertown-based St. Paul Saints, has long known the importance of keeping fans entertained. Hence the team's signature on-field antics: slip 'n' slides and sumo wrestling, milk-chugging contests and T-shirt cannons.

To engage baseball fans' creative side, the Saints have also developed what's likely the most extensive arts programming of any other professional sports team. The team hires local bands to perform outside CHS Field's front gate and local actors for their "ushertainer" crew of costumed characters to rile up the crowd.

The Saints also enlist visual artists to create installations around the park and art activities for fans roaming the stands — commissioned coloring sheets to fill in, for example, when the game's tempo lags.

Most surprisingly, the stadium was designed with its own gallery space for local artists to sell their work during games.

"We have this constant presence of artwork at the park, but also living, breathing artists from the community," explained Rachel Wacker, who oversees the Saints arts programs. "It's a reminder to the fans that artists are your neighbors. These are real people in your community, and you can meet them and talk to them."

Bringing artists to the ballfield is just one more way the Saints keep things fresh for fans. It also gives artists exposure to an audience beyond the usual cohort that attends open studios, art fairs and gallery exhibitions, said Bryan Boyce, executive director of Minneapolis' Cow Tipping Press, which has sold its poetry collections at CHS Field.

Boyce said that bringing artists into the stadium fits with the Saints' outside-the-diamond approach to baseball. This is a team that trains "ball pigs" to trot out to home plate, after all. "It's the right sports venue to be selling funky creative writing, because they're already hamming it up a bit," Boyce said.

Lowertown arts

As the Saints prepared to move into CHS Field in 2015, the team hoped to support Lowertown's artist community, not edge it out.

Back then, Wacker was a Lowertown artist fighting to keep artists a part of the gentrifying neighborhood's culture. When the Saints asked locals how they could be a good neighbor, she and other artists asked that the team establish opportunities for them inside the park, instead of simply purchasing a few pieces of their work to install.

By the Saints' second season in Lowertown, Wacker had signed on to oversee the ballpark's art engagement activities and artists' vendor space, Andy's Gallery. (It's named after the late artist Andy Nelson, who painted murals at Midway Stadium, the Saints former home.)

To recruit and schedule artists, the Saints work with a nonprofit organization called the Show, which creates opportunities for artists, especially those with disabilities. While the state's most elite sports teams tend to cultivate a moneyed, status-seeking crowd, the Saints underdog-embracing mentality dovetails with the ethos of the Show, said its founder, Winna Bernard. "We're including people who are never included," she said.

Cow Tipping Press works with authors who have intellectual and developmental disabilities, and due to their charismatic sales tactics, including quippy slogans, the group sometimes rings up bigger sales at CHS Field than at their typical bookstore events, Bryce said. "We like to say we're the cheapest thing in the in the ballpark because we sell our books for five bucks — that's cheaper than beer!"

Andy's Gallery

Minneapolis artist Kris Lange usually paints while she sells her work at games, attracting curious children and giving them a small piece of art.

"I like being outdoors, and listening to the game in the background makes for a very exciting time," she said.

St. Paul artist Juan T. Parker says showing his work at Andy's Gallery has been "very motivating." He often paints kids' faces while selling his line of T-shirts, inspired by his daughter, emblazoned with empowering words and images for girls and women of color.

Game attendees are often eager to chat with artists, said Lauren Hughes,director of arts development for Twin Cities-based Fresh Eye Arts, whose artists have sold everything from paintings and screen prints to cards and tote bags. "They come up and say, 'What's this about?' " she said. "People are excited to see art in an unexpected place."

Another unexpected bonus for Saints fans: free art activities during weekend games. In the past, Wacker has commissioned local artists to design a coloring page for fans, engage fans in a midgame drawing exercise, and ask fans to title one of their artworks.

Most people don't expect sports and arts to go together, Wacker noted, referencing the classic high school rivalry between jocks and artsy misfits. But she sees a symmetry between how minor league baseball feeds talent to the major leagues, and the way Lowertown incubates artists aspiring to create world-class work.

At the same time, Wacker said, there's plenty of value in doing athletics or arts at an amateur level. "In the same way sports reminds us that, 'Hey, you might never be a professional but, get out and exercise your body and enjoy being inspired by people who do this on an elite level,' art reminds everybody that it's good to engage your creativity," she said.