History, too, and "The Perfect Fit" couldn't be a better fit for the Fuller Craft Museum and for Brockton, once a major leader in the world shoe industry. About a century ago, more than 100 factories were running here. Brockton has yet to recover from losing the shoe business.
Guest curator Wendy Tarlow Kaplan has ties to the shoe industry here. Her father, Merton B. Tarlow, and her grandfather, Aaron Tarlow, worked in the business. Merton was also a founding trustee of the Brockton Art Center, Fuller Memorial - today, the Fuller Craft Museum. (Full disclosure: In 1992, I was one of several critics in a critic-curated show organized by Kaplan at the Duxbury Art Complex Museum.)
A small historic display, put together with the help of the Brockton Shoe Museum, anchors "The Perfect Fit." A workman's bench, shoe lasts borrowed from FootJoy Shoe (one of Brockton's last shoe manufacturers), and Brockton boxer Rocky Marciano's fighting shoes pay tribute to the craftsmanship and hard work that went into making shoes here.
Those items are mundane and gritty in contrast to most of the artworks in "The Perfect Fit," many of which are such flights of fancy, they might as well have wings affixed to their heels. There are ruby slippers as well as soldiers' boots and bronzed baby shoes.
They're also the stuff of a great craft show, straddling the seam between traditional and contemporary craft. Shoes are rooted in early handcraft - woodwork and leatherwork. The objects here, mostly made in traditional craft mediums of textile, wood, metal, glass, and ceramic, have wit and visual pizzazz. You probably couldn't actually wear any of them, but they're great for wading in metaphor.
They reach back further in history than Brockton's shoe trade. Marjorie Schick's spectacular "Chopines and Puddles," just inside the entrance to the gallery, is a fantastical evocation, in painted wood, plastic, and pâpier-maché, of a platform shoe popular in Venice and England in the late 16th century.
