My grandfather worked for the George E. Keith Shoe Co. in Brockton from 1924-1943, so I had more than the usual interest when I heard Fuller Craft Museum was doing a shoe-related exhibit. Brockton was one of the world's footwear capitals in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the industry and the prosperity it brought slowly faded away, due to competition from foreign labor and changing tastes. While there's a historical sidebar to the Fuller Craft exhibit, "The Perfect Fit - Shoes Tell Stories," which opens Saturday, this isn't anyone's grandfather's footwear show. It's a collection of contemporary artists' shoe-related work, which encompasses everything from historical nods to sometimes gonzo meditations on war, fashion and romance.
I couldn't make it down there for the press preview this morning, so I talked to curator Wendy Tarlow Kaplan on the phone yesterday. She knows a little bit about the history; her father and grandfather were both in the shoe industry and founded the Tarlow Cut Sole Co., which employed dozens of workers for decades, providing insoles for FootJoy golf shoes, among many others.
"I remember touring the factory on Center Street in Brockton...and the smell of leather is something I crave," Kaplan said. "Some of the artists in the exhibition (also) have ties to specific shoe companies and to having lived in Brockton. So doing this has brought me back full circle, and that's quite an added bonus."
She promises humor and poignancy and political engagement from the exhibit. "One of the artists, Ken Hruby, who is from the Boston area, has done this great wheel that he calls 'The Juggernaut,' with miniature replicas of the boots that went to Vietnam," she said. "There's a lot of political history in many of the pieces, that deal with ecology, with animate and inanimate. There's one artist who used swimming fins. There's a lot of humor and I think pointing the finger at the treachery of high-heeled shoes. I think there is something for everybody in the show."
There are about 120 works in the exhibit, perhaps 20 of them created specially for the exhibit.
"One of the artists, Judy Haberl, who is from Newton, has a spectacular presentation of over 400 bronzed baby shoes which she has assembled to mimic a classical chorus and has speakers that emanate different baby sonds, cries of joy, cries of sorrow, so you get the whole gamut of the child's experience," Kaplan said. That's called "Baby Opera."
"One of the artists who has direct Brockton ties is the textile artist Marilyn Pappas. Her maiden name is Rafkin. She has done a unique piece just for the exhibition which is a triptych, a three-part woven piece dedicated to her father, who worked for the Diamond Shoe Corp., which is called 'Max Rafkin and the Diamond Shoe Corp.' She references the success of shoe making, and a tribute to her father, and then the demise of the show industry. It's a wonderful piece."
Kaplan had long kept a mental list of artists working with shoes in one way or another, until the Fuller Craft came looking for a curator for a shoe exhibit. Kismet! But not so much a coincidence. In addition to his shoe ties, her father, Merton Tarlow, was a founding trustee and a past president of Fuller Craft,
and she remembers the family home as a site for meetings when they were
trying to get the museum off the ground.
That's not Kaplan's only family tie in the exhibit, either. Artists Lois Tarlow of Newton - Kaplan's aunt - and her son Gabriel Polonsky collaborated on "a very whimsical shoe tree which has a lot of humor and a bird's nest and shoelaces hanging off this piece."
Along with the main exhibit, in an adjacent gallery there's "a spectacular presentation of the history of all the shoe industries and their relationship to Brockton," assembled with loans from the Brockton Shoe Museum and the Footjoy company. "We have Rocky Marciano's boxing shoes!" There will also be shoemaking demonstrations and presentations by artists with Brockton ties.
Admission to the museum, at 455 Oak St. in Brockton, is $8 for adults, less for students, seniors and members. Call 508-588-6000 or click to www.fullercraft.org.
Images:
Top, Marina Dempster, Ebullient, 2008. Found shoe, bees wax, pine resin, glass seed beads, feathers. Courtesy of the artist.
Middle, Sergi Isupov, Let's Stay Together, 2007. Ceramic. Collection of Chris Rifkin. Photo: John Polak.
Bottom, Jan Hopkins, Tolerance, 2008. Grapefruit peel, cantaloupe peel and waxed linen. Photo: Ken Rowe.
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