The Founder of Can Can Wonderland Talks Building Strange Paradise

From the Haunted Basement to Can Can Wonderland, Chris Pennington has proved that populist art can pay big dividends. And he's got a new funland in the works.

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Every day in St. Paul, a roaring tornado spins through the city’s most popular golf course. It’s one of the many artist-created mini-golf holes you’ll encounter at the art extravaganza with cocktails, pinball, and nachos called Can Can Wonderland. Like everyone, I’ve been delighted with this repurposing of a long-empty can-spraying factory in St. Paul’s industrial midlands. But somehow it had escaped me that the project came from the same uncommon mind that invented the Twin Cities’ other pop-art juggernaut, Haunted Basement.

On learning this, I did what any sensible person would do, and offered to buy Chris Pennington a burger and a beer. That’s how he came to pop into Shamrocks, the eternal St. Paul burger palace and family dive bar. On arrival, he takes off his vintage trilby hat, with its discreet feather, and gives it a wave—a gesture that somehow makes him look a decade younger than his 43 years, and instantly conjures the brainy mischief-maker he once was, growing up in Madison, Wisconsin.

“When I was a little kid, I used to make up myself to look like I had been in a severe accident with fake blood and everything,” Pennington says a bit later. “And then I’d just bike around, and like, blaaaaaarrrrgh!” He shakes his hands near his face to emphasize the blaargh-ness he was feeling on his bike at the time.

Turns out, Pennington is the child of two psychologists—analyze that—who grew up with a love for vintage horror movies and horror fandom, like the magazine Fangoria and the punk band The Misfits. That’s where the fake blood first came into use.

“I was always making art,” Pennington tells me. “But it wasn’t ‘I’m making art.’” (He speaks the phrase I’m making art in a high-pitched whine that makes you want to set fire to those snobs and jerks.) “It was just, Let’s do some shit.”

So, in his teens and 20s, shit was done. That included bartending, being a terrible student, playing bass in a rock band called The Purple Mushroom Band, and studying film in Milwaukee. There, he says, he “shriveled.”

“I always liked art and my parents were like, You’re not getting an art degree,” Pennington recalls. That’s how, in 1997, he landed at the University of Minnesota.

Following his parents’ rules, Pennington became a Minneapolis public school teacher, with the plan to make art in the summertime. He worked as a teacher for 16 years, including stints at Edison High School and North High. There, he found himself facing what every public school teacher faces: “It was always so hard to find money to do what you wanted to do. That’s where I came up with my big idea: Don’t hold a bake sale; build a bakery.”

At Edison, Pennington helped set up a bike shop where kids repaired bikes and sold them to sustain the training program. Later, while still at Edison, Pennington started a greenhouse, where kids could raise plants to sell, instead of purchasing them from garden centers. Soon, the students were building and selling bat houses, too. “How do we cash-flow education?” he says of this time in his life.

Meanwhile, Pennington created public art projects: covering plazas at the U in giant chalk dots, or throwing 500-person dress-up house parties with themes like “The Sleaze Party.” He also volunteered at the Soap Factory, the warehouse near the east side of Stone Arch Bridge that has functioned as a third space for installations and other experimental art.

“The day I got the door code, it was magical,” Pennington says. “You could drive up, push the buttons, open the door, and make art. What, as a 20-year-old, is cooler than that?”

One of Pennington’s greatest schemes  involved creating a haunted house in the building’s stinking, animal-carcass-strewn basement. “It was such a wreck down there,” he recalls. “It was so actually scary: an open sewer, garbage, wreckage. It was the best.” 

Minneapolis’s fire marshals found it to be so legitimately scary they wouldn’t allow the doors to open. But the following year, during the Soap Factory’s biennial, Pennington got the exhibit up to code. The horror show proved such a hit that lines ran down the block. Soon enough, the Haunted Basement was paying the health insurance and dental plans of the Soap Factory’s employees. (Bakeries, not bake sales!)

Eventually the Soap Factory spun off Haunted Basement into its own nonprofit. And while today the Soap Factory is in financial jeopardy, Pennington remains part of the group trying to save it.

It was around this time that Pennington contributed a mini-golf hole to the Walker Art Center’s artsy mini-golf course, which was being run by museum staffer Christi Atkinson. He also married a Menomonie, Wisconsin, redhead he had met at the Triple Rock Social Club, and she happened to be a skilled grant writer and nonprofit manager. “Jennifer Pennington is the CEO of Can Can Wonderland and the CEO of my life,” Pennington says with a laugh.

The two Penningtons and Atkinson got to talking about a way to free artists from galleries, from grants, and from the whole architecture of rich people and rich organizations. The three put together a business proposal so persuasive that the real-estate broker they were using to find a location became the fourth owner of Can Can Wonderland.

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From the outside, Can Can Wonderland seems like a hive of fun. Mini-golf lines snake into the corridors of the gargantuan factory. Parents clutch avant-garde cocktails that look like carrots growing in flowerpots of dirt, while they school their kids in how to work a 25-cent pinball machine. Meanwhile, in another corner, an artist may be leading a tableside demonstration in free screen-printing or giving tap-dance classes. The stage has become one of the most interesting new arts venues in town, hosting musicians, drag shows, burlesque, and dance. 

But behind the scenes, what’s less obvious is that, in 2017, Can Can’s first year, the organization paid $570,000 to local artists (including an in-house fabrication crew and those stage performers). 

Last year, Can Can took in $4 million. Pennington will be directing $2 million to an expansion, which will add a full kitchen, two private karaoke spaces, three private party rooms, and, you know, artist-designed golf cannons.

But that’s not all! This spring, Pennington and his core Can Can crew will debut Strange Paradise, a sort of beta test of their next big art-project-with-a-revenue-stream. This operation will enlist (and support) four core installation artists: Andy Ducett, Bruce Tapola, Kayla Campbell, and Katie Lupton. Sharing the same building as Can Can, Strange Paradise will start as a 6,000-square-foot ticketed, immersive art installation, like Haunted Basement. But it won’t be haunted or go in a basement. Or, you could say, it will be like Can Can Wonderland, but without the golf.

“It’s taking the carnival model, the circus model—that’s the sweet spot of Can Can, too,” Pennington says. “Taking fine artists and making them do work that’s populist. People don’t go to galleries because they feel like they need a master’s to appreciate it.”

If it’s a hit, Strange Paradise will search for a larger site, and the Twin Cities will have a permanent ticketed, revenue-producing art installation free of both grants and galleries. 

"I think the Twin Cities is one of the three top arts cities in the country,” says Pennington. “So can we have an organic, grassroots arts organization on the level of Disney? Can artists learn to be entrepreneurs and bypass the gallery system to go straight to people, straight to the market?”

Obviously, Pennington thinks he’s already found the answer to that question. He starts to put the trilby back on his dark hair, preparing to leave Shamrocks, when I mention something about how annoying global art news has been lately. For example, a Banksy piece recently appeared on a shed in a polluted Welsh coal town. But instead of engaging with the topic of the piece—pollution—the news media treated it solely as the story of a pot of gold visited upon a peasant. The next step, we speculate, is for the shed to be dismantled, auctioned, and deposited in some fossil fuel king’s collection.

“The crew I roll with is kind of against the gallery system,” Pennington says. “The commodification of high art. Why make art for billion-dollar people? One time I bought this pamphlet—long story, but next thing I know, I’m on an e-mail with Banksy. I sent him a Fourth of July thing we were doing. He wrote back: ‘That’s cool.’ But at the time he was stenciling on pallets, construction pallets, and they were ending up in a gallery.

“I wrote to him, ‘You’re the leading artist of the 21st century. Why are you engaging with gallery culture?’

“He wrote back: ‘Fuck off.’ So that was pretty cool!”