Take a walk through history
Shoe exhibit reveals Brockton's soul
Wendy Tarlow Kaplan grew up in Brockton, where her grandfather founded the Tarlow Cut Sole Co., which her father later ran. The company cut leather that was used in the manufacture of shoes, such as the renowned FootJoy golf shoes.
The last of the city's shoemakers, FootJoy closed its Brockton plant earlier this year just as Kaplan was preparing an exhibition dedicated to the shoe, which opens this weekend at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton.
Titled "The Perfect Fit - Shoes Tell Stories," the show explores the cultural meanings of shoes, presenting shoes in a wide range of craft media.
The exhibition's 120 works are new shoes, created in the past half-decade by more than 100 artists. It's a perfect fit for a museum in Brockton, the onetime "shoe capital of the world," which experienced "the whole arc of the industry that [eventually] fell to cheap labor on other continents," guest curator Kaplan said.
Not only dominant in Brockton and New England, shoe manufacturing played a role in the nation's image abroad. At one time, British importers sought shoes from Brockton because they knew they were made to high British standards.
Kaplan, who studied at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and has worked as a curator for 30 years specializing in contemporary art, was chosen to curate the show because of her connection to Brockton's shoe industry. As a child, she toured the family factory. "The smell of leather is something I always remember and cherish," she said.
She has family ties to the Fuller Craft Museum, too. Her father, Merton Tarlow, who died three years ago, was one of the founding trustees of the organization that became Fuller Craft.
The stories shoes tell in the new exhibition range from historical and cultural themes to unexpected meanings, said Gretchen Keyworth, Fuller's chief curator. Shoes can be "symbols of degradation, sexual obsession and power, protection and warmth," Keyworth said, while also speaking to "style, fashion, and fun."
On the historical end, the museum put together a timeline of all the shoe factories and related industries in Brockton during its manufacturing history. The show includes examples of actual production shoes, said Wyona Lynch-McWhite, the museum's new executive director, including shoes from FootJoy and a shoe worn by Brockton boxing icon Rocky Marciano.
But the show's art feeds off cultural, social, or merely personal meanings of shoes. Contemporary treatments of the shoe image include shoes made from recycled materials, including used lottery tickets, mechanical tools, and hardware, Kaplan said. Artists Denise Nielsen and George Worthington fashioned a shoe made out of ribbons of wood - purple heart wood, satinwood, bloodwood, African blackwood, and maple.
Ken Hruby of South Boston, a Vietnam War veteran, created a work consisting of a huge wooden circle surrounded by Army boots, a piece that uses real shoes and brings home the meaning of "boots on the ground." The work expresses feelings drawn from the Vietnam War, including frustration and sadness that the lessons of the war have not prevented new ones, Kaplan said.
Pat Delaney of Abington plays on the pop image of magic shoes in "The Wizard of Oz" in a work titled "My Dorothy Complex: I'm Crazy About Red Shoes." Made of cotton fabrics and batting, clay buttons, and found objects, the piece depicts six types of shoes in a quilt-like composition, five of the images revolving around a tall red, high-heeled boot that looks ready to walk all over town.
Brockton native Marilyn Pappas's piece "Max Rafkin and the Diamond Shoe Corporation" consists of a man's black shoe and a woman's low-heeled red shoe in close conjunction, as if walking through life together.
Beverly Rippel of Easton is exhibiting "Earth Shoe," a high-heeled shoe made of truly earthy ingredients such as white-faced hornet nest material, beeswax, and twigs.
Brockton was the largest US producer of shoes during the Civil War, according to Fuller Craft, and had a large shoe and vibrant industry until the middle of the last century. The factories are quiet now, but shoes are still telling their stories in the museum's new exhibition.
Robert Knox can be reached at rc.knox2@gmail.com. 