Mathew Zurita
ART-399-2066
Professor. Jung
New Jersey City University
September 08, 2025
"The Art of the Sneaker"
My BFA project that I'll be showing next year at the BFA show is my sneaker photography work. Each shoe has its own unique style, color, and different creative treatment. However, what makes them so special? How do they contribute to the art world? For this, I've researched articles that can help with my thesis, onto why sneakers can be involved into art and why we should care? The one article I picked and that was my favorite to read is "The Art of the Sneaker". It explains that some would argue our obsession with sneakers goes well beyond just trying to look cool. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell writes in The Atlantic that sneakers have always been political as she surveys the lengthy and fascinating history of the sporty shoe. "As the suburbs became overrun with joggers, America’s cities saw a rise in basketball players, particularly New York, where a bold new style of play transformed the game into a spectacle of masculine swagger. Like break dancing, schoolyard basketball ritualized a competitive physicality, which bled into mainstream (white) culture. “In the 1970s, New Yorkers in the basketball and hip-hop community changed the perception of sneakers from sports equipment to tools for cultural expression,” the sneaker historian Bobbito Garcia explains in the Out of the Box catalogue. “The progenitors of sneaker culture were predominantly … kids of color who grew up in a depressed economic era.”
Before we get too carried away with this consumerist culture, some observers are there to remind us that while having cool sneakers can make us feel better about ourselves, there’s more to life than that, and sometimes the feeling is fleeting. Like filmmaker Justin Tipping, whose very appealing, semi-autobiographical indie film debut Kicks centered around a teen boy in the East Bay who finds a way to get some fresh shoes, only to have them snatched off his feet by a gang. Which sets him on a quest to get those sneakers back. Jankel argues that through shopping addiction and excessive consumption (including obsessive sneaker collecting), we very quickly become used to the feeling of enjoying a new pair of kicks, and so become desensitized to how awesome they actually are. As a result, we end up chasing “the feeling of change” rather than the object itself. Then, before you know it, you end up with 100 pairs, but they don’t give you the pleasure you thought they would, and the process becomes more about habit or compulsion than genuine pleasure release. As for me, why do I like sneakers that much? I like them simply because they look cool and people compliment them. Shoes can make or break a fit as well. We all love compliments.
Link: "The Art of the Sneaker"
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