| Bata Shoe Museum | |
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| Established | permanent location opened May 6, 1995 |
| Location | Toronto, Canada |
| Curator | Elizabeth Semmelhack |
| Public transit access | St. George (TTC), Spadina (TTC) |
| Website | batashoemuseum.ca |
Coordinates: 43°40′02″N 79°24′01″W / 43.667278°N 79.400139°W
The Bata Shoe Museum, in downtown Toronto, Canada, collects, researches, preserves, exhibits and interprets footwear from around the world. At any given time, the Museum offers four exhibitions, three of which are time-limited, as well as lectures, performances and family events.
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History
The collection which became the Bata Shoe Museum originated with Mrs. Sonja Bata. As she travelled the world on business with her husband, Mr. Thomas J. Bata of the Bata Shoe Company, she gradually built up a collection of traditional footwear from the areas she was visiting. In 1979 the Bata family established the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation to operate an international centre for footwear research and house the collection. From 1979 to 1985 the collection was on display at the offices of Bata Limited in the Don Mills area of Toronto. From June 1992 to November 1994 the Bata Shoe Museum welcomed visitors on the second floor of the Colonnade, an office and retail complex in downtown Toronto, and on May 6, 1995 the expanded Museum opened at its present location.
Collections and research
The Museum's collections, now numbering over 12,500 shoes and related objects, span 4,500 years of history and many cultures and geographic regions. Over the years, the Bata Shoe Museum Foundation has funded field trips to collect and research footwear in Asia, Europe, and circumpolar regions and cultures where traditions are changing rapidly (Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, the Canadian Inuit and the Saami people). The Foundation has also produced a number of academic publications.
Exhibitions
The Museum usually houses four exhibitions, one permanent and three time-limited and changing. The permanent exhibition, "All About Shoes: Footwear through the Ages", features diverse footwear from many historical periods and geographic areas, and looks at its significance in various cultural practices and phases of life. The three changing exhibitions are usually on display for one to two years, and may focus on a specific time period, cultural group, geographic area, or an aspect of material culture. The footwear on display, often remarkable for its construction and/or embellishment, also acts as a key to understanding its times, and illustrates social and cultural developments. Exhibitions have included: "The Perfect Pair: Wedding Shoe Stories" (2002–2004), "Paths Across the Plains: North American Footwear of the Great Plains" (2004–2005), "Icons of Elegance: Influential Shoe Designers of the 20th Century" (2005–2007), "Watched by Heaven, Tied to Earth: Summoning Animal Protection for Chinese Children" (2006–2007), and "The Charm of Rococo: Femininity and Footwear of the 18th Century" (2006–2008).
Public programs and events
The Museum also organizes lectures, performances, and social evenings, often with an ethnocultural focus or community partner. A representative activity would be "Step Into Tango: Milonga at the Bata Shoe Museum" (2008), an Argentinian tango evening featuring live music, dancers, a tango singer, Argentinian refreshments and a display of elegant tango shoes. Events often illuminate a personal connection or a cultural context in which footwear was created; for example, "In the Shoes of an Elizabethan Lady: The Passions and Scandals of Frances Walsingham" (2007) featured a curator's lecture and short concert of period music followed by an exhibition viewing. Themed family activities have included storytelling, music, arts and crafts, and trying on funky shoes.
Education, teachers' resources and online exhibitions
Approximately 10,000 students come to the Museum every year on field trips. Teachers, students and non-students alike also visit the Museum's online exhibitions: "On Canadian Ground: Stories of Footwear in Early Canada" and "All About Shoes", which latter features artifacts and information from some of the Museum's most popular exhibitions. "All About Shoes" also provides teachers' resources with classroom activities and projects. The best entries in the International Shoe Design Competition (2007), co-organized by the Museum and IFFTI (International Foundation of Fashion Technology Institutes), are also viewable online.
Building
Designed by Raymond Moriyama and completed in 1995, the structure sits on the southwest corner of Bloor and St. George Streets in downtown Toronto. Its form is derived from the idea of the museum as a container. Taking this further and associating it with footwear, Moriyama stated that the building is meant to evoke an opening shoe box, realised in a somewhat deconstructivist form with its canted walls and its copper-clad roof offset from the walls of the building below in an interesting play of volume and void. The main facade (north) along Bloor Street pinches inward to where the entrance, in the form of a glass shard, emerges, creating a more generous forecourt. This glass protrusion is one end of a multi-level 'cut' through the building which contains the main vertical circulation, providing a clear view through the building to the three-story faceted glass wall, designed by Lutz Haufschild, on the south facade. The entire stone volume appears to float above a ribbon of glass display windows on street level, and its vast expanse of limestone glows in the late afternoon sunlight.
The publicly-accessible part of the building consists of four stories, which contain four galleries, two lecture and multi-purpose rooms, a gift shop, the lobby and atrium, as well as offices and conservation facilities. Typical of most museums, the gallery spaces are neutral in design, allowing focus on the creative displays, not the building itself. However, traditional materials such as cast bronze and leather (an important material in shoe creation for centuries) are used in signage throughout the museum.
Raymond Moriyama said of the edifice: "Architecture is never the creation of the architect alone. The museum's architecture should be seen as a celebration not only of shoes but also of the wonderful vision that brought them into the public eye."
The Bata Shoe Museum was featured in an episode of The Amazing Race: Family Edition, for which the contestants were in Toronto. Teams had to choose a pair of shoes, and find the woman who fit the selected pair amongst 100 candidates.
Affiliations
The Museum is affiliated with: CMA, CHIN, and Virtual Museum of Canada.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bata Shoe Museum |
References
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