This winter Claudell Cain, a 12th-grader at Fenger Academy High School, managed to squeeze the story of his father’s life onto a pair of old dress shoes. In a series of tiny paintings that begin on the right shoe and continue on the left, he depicts his dad’s trajectory from street-level drug dealing to prison and then back to his family.
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Last October Cheryl Boone brought a pair of old shoes into the Fenger classroom where she teaches art. She’d gessoed the pumps white and decorated them with red and orange flames up the heels, plus images representing the fun times she’d had in college, when she wore the shoes into the ground barhopping. “The kids thought they were really cool,” she says. Then she explained her idea: Each of her students was to get a pair of shoes from someone else and find out what that person did in those shoes–did anything significant happen in their lives, did they go anywhere special, how did they feel? Then they were to paint the shoes to match the story. Boone’s plan was to auction the results off and donate the proceeds to a children’s charity.
However, once a few kids started bringing in shoes and stories, others became motivated. Says Boone, “I would hear their friends asking, ‘What’s the story of your shoes? What happened in your shoes?’ And they started to get into what was going on.”
After the exhibit is over, Kevin Hope has plans for his shoes. “My mom hasn’t seen the shoes yet, but after they come out of the museum, she promises to wear them to church one more Sunday, just to show them off. After she sees how they look, I don’t know if she’ll want to wear them–I mean, dang, they’re not ugly, but it’s gonna be hard to find something to wear with them.”
