PrintSole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art
EnlargeSole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art tells the story of the West from the literal ground up. From our dusty, beat-up friends to our hand-tooled beauties, the cowboy boot resonates with Western life and lore, which is why the New Mexico Museum of Art chose this symbol of the wild frontier to illustrate the history of the West in a clever new way. The exhibition includes more than 130 objects spanning the late 1800s to the present, featuring paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, advertisements, video imagery, and, of course, boots.
The exhibit showcases how the boot has outgrown its humble origins of cowhand functionality to enter the realm of fashion and fine art, like contemporary Oklahoma artist Lisa Sorrell’s gorgeous kangaroo and crocodile leather boot sculpture titled Butterflies and Bluebirds, which would be equally at home in a cowgirl’s closet as in a display case. Taking another approach to immortalizing our “sole,” New Mexico artist Carol Sarkisian transforms a worn-out pair of tin artist Maurice Dixon’s boots, simply titling the now jewel-encrusted footwear Maurice’s Boots.
The works of Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and Herbert “Buck” Dunton provide a descriptive, if sometimes romanticized, view of the cowboy, while modern-day videographer David Politzer toys with the image these artists created and Hollywood westerns reinforced. In Rio Macho, Politzer examines our inability to differentiate between the myth and reality of the cowboy with his offbeat take on western “buddy movies.” The film follows Politzer and his TV pardner (he actually carries the set around with him) as they visit scenic vistas, reflect on horsemanship, and sing a duet around a campfire.
Another art form taking center stage in this exhibit is country music. Not only do favorite tunes play in the background, but each section of the exhibit takes its title from a popular song. The introduction, “I See by Your Outfit that You Are a Cowboy,” sums it all up. As boot maven Sam Lucchese Jr. once said, “In making a pair of boots for a man, we have to be aware that our product is his foundation.”
EXHIBIT: May 14–September 5, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, 505.476.5072, www.nmartmuseum.org.
BOOK: Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art, by Joseph Traugott, Museum of New Mexico Press, www.mnmpress.org.
Issue: July 2010
