Saboteuse

Point of Entry
Brown University
Lindenman Performing Arts Center
April 23 - May 27, 2026

Opening Reception April 23 5:30 - 6:30

“In the Fall of 2025, I was among 10 artists selected to make pieces with a 120-year-old American elm that was cut down on Brown’s main green.
When the value of art is reduced to aesthetics of the surface - to its static image - it decreasingly serves as a point of entry into anything beyond itself. Divorced from the social and material conditions that surround it, its meaning becomes self-referential or entirely subjectivized in the eye of the beholder. Instead, this show sought works that expand the horizon of significance beyond the local and immediate, bringing engagement with a work of art out of the privacy of the individual and into the public.”

I answered this call for art because the ideas behind it aligned so well with my life’s mission - to reconnect different publics with our footwear-making systems in order to change them. I felt it was also a perfect opportunity to carve a pair of wooden lasts to the measurements of my feet from scratch. This elm tree provided critical and meaningful material that will now serve as a tool to build long-lasting repairable boots and facilitate all the macro discussions that this simple and complex act represents.

Fun Saturday night tool patent search inspired by the bootmaking hive mind! Check out ‘s post with these cool 1869 shank lasters patented by Frederick Henderson of Marietta Ohio. While hunting for this patent I came across all these other designs. This was my favorite part of the work, seeing the human innovation and problem@solving through rapid tool development. Thanks for tagging me

STUDENT WORK - Cali

offered The Cowboy Boot 101 this Wintersession for the second time with critical support from

Each student built boots from raw materials over 5 weeks: 11 classes with me and so many hours working on their own. They all used Chromexcel vamps for and Cali used leather her grandmother tanned for the tops.

The students had the option of inseaming or a whipstitched cemented construction dress boot.

We started with measuring feet and ordered Krentler 3705 Combination lasts from ; each student built boots for their own feet.

At we value learning through making. I tried to impart respect for this traditional art of bootmaking, stress that where/how we learn this craft is not typically in an institutional setting, and that the larger implications of reconnecting design to how things are built and what knowledge systems are preserved are critical lessons to all. The students accomplished an extraordinary amount of knowledge absorption.