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New Guggenheim Show Walks Outside the Museum Walls

By Amy Zimmer | April 29, 2011 7:24am | Updated on April 29, 2011 7:18am

By Amy Zimmer

DNAinfo News Editor

MANHATTAN — The atrium of the Guggenheim Museum will be turned into a shoemaker's workshop next Wednesday — with a cobbler's bench and shoe racks in place of sculptures and paintings.

The installation is part of a 10-day series by a cutting edge San Francisco-based art collective of teachers, designers, gardeners and scientists called Futurefarmers who, for their first solo show in New York, will create a series of works addressing the sole and the soul.

The public talks, walks and interactive art will take place in the entrance of the famed Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, as well as beyond the building's walls.

The Guggenheim was looking for "a short term project that made people experience the museum or the building in a different way," explained Futurefarmers' Amy Franceschini.

"The entryway was the most exciting space for us because it's free. Everybody has access to that space."

The shoemaker's studio was inspired by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, who supposedly left Athens to seek out Simon the shoemaker, whose studio was a hub for local youth to discuss such big ideas as education, beauty, truth and judgment, Franceschini said. 

After opening its show with "Soul/Sole Sermons," delivered by contemporary writers in their atrium atelier, the group will take their installation to different neighborhoods around the borough, with a sidewalk-length roll of paper.  The public will be invited to transcribe the sermons wearing shoes crafted by the collective, each with a letter on the sole.

Futurefarmers made their own characters on 36 shoes and created their own ink from soot collected from the sidewalk cracks and windowsills of shoe repair shops across the city.

"What we felt was missing in New York was poetry," Franceschini said of the project she described as a "mixture of craft and making and thinking."

"It's always a conversation," said David van der Leer, the museum's assistant curator of architecture and urban studies, who explained how the show represented a new direction for the museum.

"You're taking it out to the city," van der Leer said. "I think you will encounter people in a different way and people will encounter the art in a different way. I love that you actually stumble upon it."

The "pedestrian press" will make its debut on May 7 along the Bowery near the New Museum during this weekend's Festival of Ideas for the New City.

It will then travel to Harlem on May 11 near a former shoemaking store, Soul Kitchen. The show will culminate with the press placed in front of the museum on Fifth Avenue.

To follow this human-powered press, the museum will be tweeting (@Guggenheim and #Futurefarmers) its whereabouts throughout the show.

The Futurefarmers' show will take place at the Guggenheim Museum and beyond from May 4 - 14.