Guest curated by award-winning shoemaker, artist, and educator Amara Hark Weber, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to both learn about bespoke footwear and celebrate a small world of incredibly skilled craftspeople who work outside the limelight of the contemporary craft focus.

In this exhibition at The Hub, Sleaford, contemporary fashion artist Jo Cope asks the audience to think through their feet and consider walking as a metaphor for life’s journey, with feet, paths, and directions as moral and symbolic guides.

Humankind has been preoccupied with horror and the gruesome for as long as anyone can remember. Death and the Devil at the Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, is the first exhibition to chart this unwavering attraction across eras and genres.

“What’s a shoe?” - The Virtual Shoe Museum and Pécs Gallery have joined forces to present a remarkable selection of works by international and Hungarian artists and designers that challenges the very definition of what a shoe can be. Finishing on the 3rd September 2023, this is one not to miss!

From spring cherry blossoms as a symbol of new beginnings to the fall-blooming chrysanthemum as an emblem of joy and happiness, each floral motif holds a unique story. A celebration of how nature has provided meaning and material for shoemaking across both time and place, In Bloom: Flowers and Footwear features some of the most beautiful shoes from the Bata Shoe Museum’s collection.

Curated by shoemaker and artist Amara Hark-Weber, this exhibition features 11 accomplished shoe and boot makers working across the United States. These makers build upon tradition in the creation of modern bespoke footwear. In conversation with historic shoes from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, the work ranges from sculptural to practical, from traditional to conceptual.

Jo Cope has carved out a niche as an artist focussing on our cultural relationship with shoes. After a decade of international exhibitions the Leicester Gallery at De Montfort University now hosts a homecoming show featuring the largest collection of her work to date.

The Bata Shoe Museum’s latest exhibition tells the story of how we have become a society obsessed with shoes.

‘Fitting In’ at Z33, House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium gathers artists, (fashion) designers and activists to explore the concept of identity, asking ‘how do we find our place in today’s world, where we are surrounded by so many voices at once?’.

‘Trainers: A Global Obsession’ showcases the Northampton Museum’s extensive trainer collection to explore the design, technology , cultural influences and environmental impact of the training shoe over the last 100 years.

The Museum at FIT, New York, presents Shoes: Anatomy, Identity, Magic, an innovative exhibition that explores our physical, social, and psychological relationship with footwear. Curated by Dr. Valerie Steele, MFIT director and chief curator, and Colleen Hill, curator of costume and accessories, the exhibition features more than 300 of the 5,000 pairs of shoes, boots, sandals, and sneakers in the museum’s permanent collection, aka “the closet.”

Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto explores over fifty futuristic footwear designs from the auto-lacing Nike MAG to the virtual RTFKT x Staple Meta-Pigeon. It considers how cutting-edge technologies, unexpected materials, and new ideas are transforming footwear today…

Shoes Have Names is a collaboration with conceptual fashion designer Jo Cope and Shelter. Stories of homelessness have never been told like this before.

Head to Toe explores more than two hundred years of women’s dress from 1800 through the early twenty-first century, focusing on the role that accessories play within the total ensembles of Western women’s fashion, as well as the messages that they communicate about social and cultural values.