SANTA FE, N.M. — Joseph Traugott stretches out his Tony Lama boots and peers around a New Mexico Museum of Art gallery filled with plastic-wrapped boots, paintings and photographs, and the sounds of an old-time cowboy singer crooning “Have I told you lately that I love you.”
He’s helping put the finishing touches on the new exhibit “Sole Mates: Cowboy Boots and Art,” which opened Saturday.
Cowboy boots are one of America’s most recognizable icons, said Jim Arndt of Santa Fe, whose photographs of cowboy boots are featured in the exhibit.
“Americans have a love affair with the cowboy, and always have … whether it comes from the freedom, just being part of the Wild West,” he said.
The exhibit ranges through more than a century of the cowboy icon, from 19th century illustrator Frederic Remington to the cowboy of 1950s television and movies to the West in modern art and photography, where motorcycles and pickups replace horses.
Arndt said cowboy boots probably developed from a utilitarian, high-top boot to protect people riding through brush. Early ones in the vein of what’s now recognized as a cowboy boot started around the Civil War.
Titles or lines from cowboy songs introduce exhibit sections.
The origins of the cowboy myth are explored in “It Was Once in the Saddle I Used to Go Dashing,” focusing on Remington woodcuts that illustrated Theodore Roosevelt’s tales of cowboys and western life in Century magazine. A rare pair of 1880s boots and an open copy of the long-defunct magazine complete the display.
“A Fair Lady From the Plains” is “about romance, it’s about fashion, it’s about allure,” Traugott said.
A postcard of a cowboy and an adoring woman illustrates romantic notions from the early 20th century’s dime novel period. Pages from a 1950s catalog for western wear portray both men and women with impossibly small waists.
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