The cowboy boot is an iconic symbol.

I build boots by hand from raw materials, and I am a woman.

The cowboy boot is an iconic symbol of America’s idealized vision of itself: rugged individualism, westward expansion, independence, and strength of character. A complex and sophisticated handcraft, Western bootmaking is a vulnerable tradition. Despite its near obliteration by the arc of mechanized footwear production its survival has been tenuously ensured by a contemporary influx of female bootmakers like me. Flexibility in women’s lives has thrown an ironic lifeline to bootmaking, an American tradition steeped in sexism.

Women historically have been denied access to an acquisition of bootmaking knowledge through the systems in place for passing on these specialized techniques. A vanguard of female bootmakers is redefining this living tradition. Some bootmakers I admire are Deana McGuffin and Lisa Sorrell. While I am newly integral to this movement of artisans with artistry, I distinguish myself from the traditional idea of bootmaking by using my craft process as methodology to parse ideas and to create art that communicates experience, is grounded in questioning historical legacies, and is both informed by and provokes scholarly research.

Instead of adding to the Western bootmaking anthology with client-based work, as is typical, I build boots for exhibition that use the iconography of the American West itself to manipulate the strong cultural associations of these symbols; I critique whose voices are heard, well, I critique a lot of things.

Flags of our Foremothers Boots, commissioned in 2022 for the exhibition Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour

I am an artist, artisan, mother, and thinker with an insatiable interest in understanding for myself and others, the historical tangle that locates artisan work within the larger issues of gendered labor, industrialization, Place, and the cultural hierarchies of fine art, design, and craft — my incredible Art History teacher and friend Elizabeth Grossman described my work in this perfect sentence when she was writing a reference for a grant, I cannot better sum it up.

Through my lifelong art practice rooted in craft-based processes, I aim to break down these dominant hierarchies of fine art, craft, and design that have downplayed the socio-cultural value of footwear-making. I employ artmaking strategies through craft, reinventing how we transfer critical knowledge, to counter America’s — and Massachusetts in particular — exported footwear-making legacies of misogyny and racism. I am understanding my home, the under-addressed racism and sexism all around me in Eastern Massachusetts, through a slow, methodical, beautiful craft. I build boots by hand.

I believe that….

• Public awareness of our histories can heal a severed disconnect between consumers and contemporary footwear production.
• Massachusetts — a onetime footwear-producing hub instrumental in establishing the global conditions of today — really established a footwear production system that supports longstanding inequity rooted in Place that particularly exploits women and people of color. We must acknowledge and address it to some better end.
• The evolution of American capitalist footwear production prospered on misogyny at a critical parallel moment of the Arts + Crafts movement, and those deep-seated societal associations prohibited leather and footwear craft from establishing a legacy of valued/supported craft practice in the art/craft/educational worlds today.

With the artwork I produce, and the contexts where I propose to make it, my approach relating the architecture of workspaces to understanding legacies of craft knowledge repairs the disconnect of a public who no longer understands how, where, and by whom shoes are made. I provoke awareness of how mass footwear production profoundly and negatively affects individuals, targeted groups, climate, and our planet.

Bootmakers are geographically far spread, but closely rooted in community, cultures, history, and traditions that are crucially interwoven into our society. Thirty-five processes that take years to grasp comprise handmade footwear craft. This knowledge is difficult to acquire, and few bootmakers are fiscally able to train apprentices. It was hard to become a bootmaker, and I aim to bolster this tradition with multiple strategies:

IMPACT:

• Plant public seeds of awareness of ramifications in global footwear production
• Encourage the American craft community to recognize and support footwear-making
• Encourage the art world to endorse the power of craft in activism more
• Inspire bootmakers to use skills for more than client work
• Inspire youth to invest in acquiring footwear-making skills
• Provoke research into women’s roles in footwear production across different eras
• Encourage a return to footwear design with the intent to repair

STRATEGIES:

• Use the attractiveness of craft practices in unexpected venues to ignite discourse
• Exhibit artworks and the stories behind making to bring attention to painful histories

I am reinventing Western bootmaking’s structural systems of continuity by removing a living tradition from the confines of client/artisan dependence. Institutionally-supported public engagement and scholarly research through artmaking is a paradigm shift in handmade footwear. Contemporary craft art, when considered as a way to communicate ideas, can be critical to a radical transformation of the ways of passing on traditional arts.

Societal shifts are polarizing, and bootmaking offers a unique opportunity to deliberately reconcile American social and cultural divisions, whether they’re on your feet or a museum pedestal.

87th Regional Exhibition of Art and Craft at the Fitchburg Art Museum. CHEZ PRAS, handmade cowboy boots covered with 2,200 Xacto blades, took 2nd Place in the juried exhibit in 2023.