Artist’s Shoes Depict Women’s Standing

There’s room in this town for not just one, but two shows that highlight the art of the shoe. Complementing the 30-year survey of Salvatore Ferragamo’s shoe designs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Couturier Gallery is presenting Santa Cruz artist Gaza Bowen’s recent shoe art in “The Shoe Show.”

Although some of her designs could be considered reminiscent of some of Ferragamo’s, the two exhibits bear little resemblance. While he used precious leather and lavish decorations to make shoes, Bowen has finely crafted many of the dozen amusing and ironic pairs on display from household cleaning products.

“Tuff Scuffs” come with scrub brushes for soles, inverted bleach bottles for heels, and tops made from sponges and scouring pads. Bowen has put the shoes in a supermarket point-of-purchase style display that invites prospective buyers to “Dance Your Way to a Cleaner House!” and claims that when worn, this cleaning agent “Gets Where Hands Just Can’t Reach.”

“For me to make shoes, I’m getting to make all sorts of plays on words, shapes and new associations,” Bowen said. “Shoes communicate so well. They reflect so much about the people who wear them, the people who make them and the environment and materials available. Shoes and household duties have been used against women.”

“Shoes for the Little Woman,” her first linkage of cleaning materials and shoes, conveys “the antithesis of staying at home and cleaning,” she said. “They look like dance shoes. They are a blend of the two accepted roles for women pervasive in our culture.”

A pair of shoes titled “Little Woman’s Night Out” was born from the fashion world’s maxim that women should dress up to go out at night. Using metallic dishwashing aids, Bowen lived up to the challenge of making something glamorous out of those materials. The shoes are attached to scrub boards inscribed with the words, “Hand-Maid USA,” and a line from a John Prine song: “Ain’t it funny how an old broken bottle shines just like a diamond ring.”

“Valentine for the Little Woman” introduces a shoe covering of red and purple “scrubbies”--as she calls these scouring pads--topped with beads from drain chains to give the appearance of turn-of-the-century steel bead embroidery. Soap dishes make up the shoes’ Louis XIV-style heels that were also popular during the 1890s. Bowen pointed out that scrubbies are now available in designer colors, including several shades of purple.

“Angry Little Woman,” is fashioned from potato peeler blades, knives, turkey skewers and industrial-strength skewers in a reference to the bondage-and-discipline look. This creation was inspired by a cloth her sister found in a junk store that had been embroidered with meat cleavers. It is included in the piece.

“Did the woman who embroidered meat cleavers realize how angry she was?” Bowen asked with a chuckle. “I had a blast making this pair.”

“Shoes for the Natural Little Woman” have been made from all-natural materials, including wood clothes pins to form the heels. “I thought of Birkenstocks, but I couldn’t bring myself to make flats. It’s so much fun to make high heels,” she said.

Bowen also has produced a limited edition book that presents the lineage of high-heeled shoes. A red leather stiletto has been cut in half and serves as bookends to pages that open up and stretch accordion-like to 10 feet in length.

On these pages are examples from other cultures and times of very uncomfortable women’s shoes that supposedly carried erotic powers. Interwoven among the pictures are late 20th-Century newspaper, magazine and book articles that relate contemporary styles such as the stiletto to those shown in the book.

“The book idea came to me last May when I was in an East Coast museum where I saw a Japanese Geta shoe that was nine inches high. I’d never seen one that high. It was worn only by a special class of courtesan,” she remarked.

Bowen began her shoe career in the ‘60s by making brown leather sandals. She studied shoemaking with a man in Colonial Williamsburg and opened a sandal shop in Mendocino. From sandals, she moved into moccasins and then shoes made on a last, a wooden or metal model of the human foot. “I always experimented with coverings and fiber techniques when I made real shoes,” she said.

“I use shoes as a format to enjoy being alive, to be more alive, to ask questions about what being alive is about. I am captivated by the shapes and enjoy looking cross-culturally at the inventiveness of ways to cover feet. Sometimes they are totally wacky, like a 15th-Century pair with 20-inch platforms. Sometimes they are horrible, but they are incredible insights into what goes on in human minds.”

“Gaza Bowen: The Shoe Show,” at Couturier Gallery, 166 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, through May 16. Open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays - Saturdays, till 9 p.m. Wednesdays. Call (213) 933-5557.

ON WOMEN: When viewing LAart/Installations One Gallery’s mixed media show, “Women by Women/Women by Men,” it is difficult to resist looking at an artist’s painting or sculpture and pondering whether it reflects stereotypical notions of what constitutes “men’s” or “women’s” work.

But the 100 artworks by 10 men and 10 women defy such cursory categorization more often than one might expect. “I like the fact that there aren’t boy paintings and girl paintings,” gallery owner Mickey Kaplan said.

Through various styles, mediums and subject matter, the artists have created an engaging, multidimensional mix of images of women.

Lee Goldberg’s spirited collages on paper depict numerous aspects of women’s lives--friendship, freedom, work, romance--with affection and respect. Additionally, she has “sculpted” two chimerical, seated female figures, “Looking for Mr. Blackwell” and “Medicine Woman,” out of an unbelievable jumble of found objects including shells, chicken bones, paper, scraps of leather, keys, corn kernels, wire, feathers, bells, rope and more.

Robert Riemer’s Expressionist oil portraits, “Death of Elsa,” “Portrait of an Unknown Woman” and “Mother” provide a more somber, contemplative look at the presence and absence of women. Hariette Garellick’s self-portrait with two faces can be appreciated by women and men who feel that warring factions exist within them.

In contrast, Robert Moore’s life-size metal sculptures of nude women named “Judy,” “Hillary” and “Natalie” radiate a sense of fun and good times and affection from the artist for his Rubenesque ladies. Moore’s small sculptures of dancing women are also in the show.

Diane Sher sculpts dancing figures as well, including the welded metal “ ‘It’ Girl,” a dancer in chains. But her “Adam, Eve & The Apple,” diminutive and elegant, male and female torsos and an apple in cast bronze, stands tall among the show’s sculpture.

Other artists in the show are Georgia Bernocco, Carol Bardin, Joan Carl, Jan Gillen, Lauren Mendelsohn, Addee Pearce, Cheril Russell, Alex Carillo, Malcolm Doran, Dodd, Paul Gardner, Richard Klix, Mickey Kaplan, Carlos Salas and Richard Valdes.

“Women by Women/Women by Men,” at Installations One Gallery, 15821 Ventura Blvd., Encino, through April 25. Open 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. Tuesdays - Saturdays, and 7-9 p.m. Thursdays. Call (818) 981-9422. MONEY-MAKING MUGS: Since the 1930s, muralists have enhanced Southern California’s built environment with imaginative and artistically skillful scenes of the area’s history, its inhabitants and their mode of living. Most of us don’t know how the murals got there, who designed and painted them, or who, if anyone, is taking care of these cultural resources.

Five years ago Bill Lasarow, editor of the Southern California visual art guide, ArtScene, and artist/muralist Kent Twitchell took it upon themselves to found the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles to help protect, maintain and document mural art in the Los Angeles area.

To benefit the work of the conservancy, and to celebrate ArtScene’s 10th anniversary, the publication will have a silent auction of original artists’ cups created by 14 prominent Los Angeles artists April 25 at the Koplin and Sherry Frumkin galleries in Santa Monica.

The public is invited to the auction, and to attend a panel discussion by ArtScene columnists on the development of art in the Los Angeles area over the past decade.

A reception after the panel discussion will honor the ArtScene columnists and the following artists who created cups for the benefit: Lita Albuquerque, Martha Alf, David Botello, Mark Bowerman, Robbie Conal, Margaret Garcia, Art Mortimer, Frank Romero, Terry Schoonhoven, May Sun, Roderick Sykes, Kent Twitchell, Tom Van Sant and Richard Wyatt.

In addition to the original cups up for auction, Lasarow said, a Signatures Cup, which contains the signatures of each participating artist, and at least seven of the designs will be reproduced for sale in limited editions.

“Artists’ Cups Auction,” to benefit the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, at Koplin Gallery and Sherry Frumkin Gallery, 1438/40 9th St., Santa Monica, April 25. Panel discussion on “Southern California: A Decade of Development in Art” from 6-7:30 p.m.; reception and auction from 7:30-10 p.m. Tickets $20, $15 for reception and auction only. Limited seating for panel. For reservations, call (213) 481-1186 or 482-4724.