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LAWRENCE -- University of Kansas artist and professor Carol Ann Carter has never been a collector of objects, but in the past few years, antique dealers know to call her when they find old baby shoes.
A show of Carter's work including baby-sized shoe forms is on exhibit Jan. 5 to March 4 at Washburn University's Mulvane Art Museum, 17th and Jewell, Topeka.
Carter says her work reflects her journeys in a search for home that have meant crossing cultural and professional borders and breaking bonds of social conventions. Her work reflects movement, change, and in some cases freedom, which, she says, is not achieved without labor and pain.
A traveler who loves to walk, Carter began to focus on shoes after undergoing surgery in the past year for chronic foot conditions.
"Men's shoes are designed for comfort and style. But with the exception of sneakers, women's shoes are designed for style. My feet are wide and I noticed that baby shoes are designed to be wide," Carter says.
When she came to KU in 1995 as the Langston Hughes visiting professor of art, Carter had little interest in baby shoes and had never considered herself a collector. Yet as the chronic foot conditions challenged her mobility, Carter found herself collecting antique baby shoes.
As she searched for comfortable, healthful and fashionable shoes for women, Carter's friends encouraged her to create her own shoe designs. She created miniature prototype shoe forms both to promote her ideas for an adult shoe and to create art forms.
While Carter's shoe forms are diminutive, they are not necessarily adorable. She notes that the baby shoe forms express discomfort for some observers.
The baby shoe forms are part of an installation exhibition of Carter's work. Installation art addresses the interaction between objects, humans and their context in time and space. Carter describes the works in the installation as "a wordless expression of having reached for and touched home on occasion."
Born in Indianapolis, Carter has journeyed outside the United States in search of home, which she describes as more a feeling of belonging rather than a place.
In 1984, with a Lilly Foundation Open Faculty Fellowship, Carter made a sabbatical trip to Nigeria seeking a cultural parallel as an American artist with African heritage. Ten years later, Carter went to Stockholm as a Fulbright Fellow seeking a cultural complement as an artist seeking to understand her space in Western civilization.
"In Scandinavia, I made an unexpectedly pleasant discovery. I found people are more alike than we are different." She also discovered "home resided in my relationship with my work partners."
Her work in the show reflects passage from her childhood and family culture in Indianapolis in the 1970s to the influences of art, the 1980s and the past decade. The show explores points of contact between past and present, life and art, art and design, and black and white, and feelings of moving from inside to outside of cultural borders.
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