A little obsessed with shoes...

Today after Dana-Farber, my mom and I decided to spend lunch at the Museum of Fine Arts which is pretty convenient to the Longwood hospital area in Boston. They've had this ongoing exhibit called "Walk This Way" since the fall I think that highlights the museum's collection of shoes. It's closing this month so we decided to check it out and it was pretty cool. The exhibit was arranged throughout the museum so we ended up just doing a walking tour really of the entire MFA, "a treasure hunt" as the exhibit map described it. It ran the gamut from simple ancient leather sandals, to these elaborate 17th c. Venetian platforms, to Turkish stilts, to Vivienne Westwood platforms and last but not least, Manolo Blahnik mary-janes ("They're like an urban shoe myth!")

Oh. And Dice-K's cleats. Lest we forget we're in Boston...

It was really cool though as I, like most warm-blooded females, am harbouring a bit of a shoe fetish and a burgeoning collection of my own. I'm also a bit of a sucker for functional art and it was neat to see the different shoes and their various uses throughout time and society. A lot of times the shoes were set up next to paintings where they were illustrated so that would be really interesting to see in terms of just discovering new details you otherwise wouldn't notice.

We had a leisurely lunch at the cafe after where I had an appropriately artsy-fartsy meal of soup and the cheese plate. We then went through a small exhibit we had passed earlier on British prints from basically between WWI and WWII which I really enjoyed, although I was disappointed they didn't have more posters in the gift shop.... oh well. It was really nice to be at the MFA and see it on a 'work' day though; it reminded me of my school days spent throughout the museum. I first discovered art history my final year of high school and immediately fell in love. We managed a few field trips to the MFA where we'd focus on whichever collections or time periods we were studying at the time - after a general tour we'd usually have to pick a piece and then prepare a 10-15 minute presentation essentially based on just our own observations. I loved doing that. I remember one time presenting a Velasquez painting in the gallery of the Great Masters.... It was the first time academically that I felt truly inspired. That I felt confident enough in my self and my own observations to not only make judgments but to propose my own theses and raise questions - to really discover something. I felt that same feeling today and it was great to see so many other people gaining so much from a museum. We saw grandparents explaining portraits to their grandchildren, school kids being asked what they noticed about the Egyptian mummies, grad students sketching while their instructor animatedly discussed the sculpture they were seated around, even just individuals quietly sitting on the couch composing their own sketches from a painting. I don't know, for whatever reason it just really struck a chord with me today to see so many people getting so much out of a subject I'm so passionate about. It was inspiring, which is exactly what art is supposed to do; that's what's so great about it.

I balked as my mother and I studied Kevin Garnett's custom Celtics' adidas What the heck are basketball shoes doing in the Ancient Greece galleries?! You know what though? Those shoes are what are "so cool" to the eight year old boy being dragged to the MFA by who knows who. And those shoes, placed in the back corner of the Ancient Greek sculpture gallery, are going to get that kid to not only marvel at the sneakers, but to then notice how all the Greek athletes painted on the vases on display around him are barefoot. And from that back corner, he's going to have to walk by the vases, the bowls, the beautiful sculptures that depict life in Ancient Greece. He's seeing. He's learning.

And hey, did you know Dice-K's right cleat has a reenforced rubber toe because of his unique pitching style? Or that Run-DMC didn't lace their adidas to show solidarity with people in jail because shoelaces are forbidden? Yea, neither did I...