Artist Fashions Nike Air Jordan 5s From Trash

On May 27, 1990, the Hansa Carrier was traveling from South Korea to Seattle when a sudden storm pummeled the freighter and spilled its contents into the Pacific Ocean near the Alaskan peninsula. While the ship survived the squall, all of its cargo flew overboard, including several 40-foot steel containers holding 61,820 Nike sneakers. In the ensuing weeks, months and years, thousands of the shoes littered beaches across the Pacific Northwest.

Now, 30 years later, sculptor Andy Yoder is revisiting the incident known as the “The Great Shoe Spill of 1990” in a new solo exhibition. “ Even today, a lot of people know about the shoe spill and have a rememberance of it, ” Yoder says.

Called “Overboard,” the exhibition at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center in Brattleboro, Vermont, features more than 200 replica Nike Air Jordan 5 athletic shoes created by the sculptor, the same type of sneaker that met its untimely fate in 1990 just as it was being released to consumers by Nike. But instead of working with fabric and thread, Yoder crafts each piece using trash he has foraged around his suburban Washington, D.C. neighborhood. The result is a colorful body of work that adds to the ongoing conversation about environmental protection.

“I think we’ve all become numb to the constant drumbeat [about saving the environment],” Yoder says. “It’s so dire and unavoidable, and the message needs to come at us in a different way that’s not too preachy or doomsday, and [this exhibition] is a backdoor way of doing just that. I wanted to look into how consumer culture effects the environment. When we buy something, it’s often manufactured overseas and travels by shipping container.”

Equipped with scissors and a hot glue gun, Yoder—no stranger to dumpster diving—has fashioned dozens of replica sneakers from discarded packaging emblazoned with the logos of well-known brands like Tiffany & Co., Coca-Cola, Corona Extra, Hot Wheels, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s and Nike (obviously). Displayed on shelves similar to what you would see at a shoe retailer, the 240 replica Jordan 5s intentionally call into question the environmental impact consumerism has on our planet.

“I like the idea of using these iconic brands, because I’m kind of hitching my wagon to their visual horsepower,” he says. “It’s that flash of recognition that draws people’s eyes to the shoes. And not only that, but shoes are also amazing as sculptural objects themselves; the form of them and their curves, and the way the shapes wrap around them. They’re a combination of form and function.”

Danny Lichtenfeld, director of the Brattleboro Museum and the curator of this exhibition, agrees, adding that Yoder's ability to make the topics of ocean pollution and excess consumerism approachable is what makes his art so brilliant.

“This exhibition let's us see things through the lens that [Yoder] views the world,” Lichtenfeld says. “He has hit upon a way to engage on those issues that's both playful and captivating, and grabs your attention and draws you in.”

Lichtenfeld says many of the pieces on display contain Easter eggs that will surprise viewers. “ The way he manipulates the packaging materials and turns them into sneakers, revealing and hiding certain parts of the logos, is very clever, ” he says. “ Even the way he displays each object is creative. For instance, he has a Corona beer sneaker displayed next to a shoe he made from a box of Clorox bleach. ”

Now 63 , Yoder was 33 when the shoe spill occurred, and still in the early stages of his career as a sculptor, studying the art form at the Cleveland Institute of Art and later at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Over the years, he has regularly incorporated random everyday objects into his artwork; he has made dress shoes from licorice and a globe from matches . While he admits he doesn’t remember much about the incident when it happened, he says that the news did cause a frenzy among shoe collectors and beachcombers living along the West Coast, who scrambled to gather the sneakers as they reached land. Soon, collectors began setting up swap meets so that they could exchange salvaged shoes and find matching pairs. Remarkably, as The Seattle Times reported in 1992, the “ shoes were still wearable after many months' battering by storms and water. ”

While it should come as no surprise that sneakerheads would clamor for the chance to get free limited-edition shoes, an unlikely group was intrigued by the potential prospects these drifting sneakers presented: oceanographers.

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer based in Washington state who was studying oceanic dispersion and currents, was one of them. About a year after the 1990 accident occurred, and as more and more shoes reached land, his mother gave him a news clipping from The Seattle Times about the event, thinking he would find the story amusing.

“She asked me, isn’t this what you do as an oceanographer?” Ebbesmeyer recalls. “I told her I’d look into it.”

Inspired, he contacted Jim Ingraham, a former classmate from the University of Washington, which is where he earned his PhD in oceanography. After graduation, Ingraham had developed a computer program called the Ocean Surface Current Simulator (OSCURS) for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to calculate the effects of ocean currents on salmon migration. Ebbesmeyer hypothesized that if he gave Ingraham the unique serial numbers stamped on each shoe, along with the location of where the shoe spill occurred (point A), Ingraham could determine point B, or where each shoe would eventually wash ashore.

“With the [serial numbers] Nike provided, I could determine conclusively whether any shoe that washed up had fallen off the Hansa,” Ebbesmeyer writes in an article for University of Washington Magazine , published by his alma mater in 2009. “The first beachcombers' reports of sneakers washing up—“forerunners,” as one reporter called them [in the '90s]—were equally specific. I had something that's very rare with spontaneous flotsam (as opposed to determinate drift markers): both point A, when and where an object starts to drift, and point B, when and where it washes up."

Ebbesmeyer says that gathering information of where the shoes washed ashore and getting the serial numbers from Nike was the most time-consuming aspect of the project. Luckily, he found a beachcomber and painter living in Oregon named Steve McLeod, who had been keeping meticulous data of where and when 1,600 of the shoes were found. Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham inputed that data into OSCURS and were able to predict with certainty where the currents would sweep each sneaker.

“OSCURS homed in like a carrier pigeon,” Ebbesmeyer wrote, “making direct hits on the earliest point B's—November and December 1990 on the Washington coast and January and February 1991 on Vancouver Island—where the first sneakers washed up.”

In August 1992, they published their findings in the science news publication Eos . “As soon as that article published, my phone did not stop ringing,” Ebbesmeyer says. “Everyone wanted to talk to me about the shoes and ocean currents.”

By studying flotsam and hundreds of cargo spills over the years, Ebbesmeyer and Ingraham found that there are 11 major gyres or ocean currents spread across the planet, each with a different timetable of how long it takes an object to travel in its orbit.

“We studied hundreds of container spills and other flotsam and we found out that the ocean currents go in great circles, which I've been calling 'gyres,'” he says. “I found that the planet's oceans are covered with these gyres; [there are] about a dozen of them.”

By knowing the gyre where an oceanic incident occurs, be it an oil spill or a container ship losing containers full of sneakers, he can predict the circular direction the spill will travel and when it will reach land. Over the years, he's studied numerous oceanic spills, including hockey gloves and rubber duckies , and continues to publish a monthly newsletter called Beachcombers' Alert that reports on flotsam found in the ocean.

“I found out that my profession of oceanography didn’t study or utilize things that floated on the ocean’s surface, only what was underwater,” he says. “I thought it was a blind spot, so I started looking into container spills. My research wasn’t purpose driven, it was out of curiosity.”

That curiosity has made Ebbesmeyer into the world’s foremost expert on what he calls flotsametrics, earning him the title “oceanic gumshoe.” In 2010, he co-wrote a book on the subject called Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science .

Over the years, a number of cargo spills have made headlines, from hundreds of Garfield phones washing ashore in France to 28,000 rubber ducks hitting landfall along the East Coast, all of them a captivating reminder of the impact humans have on our planet. That connection is what artist Andy Yoder is hopeful will resonate when people see his Air Jordan exhibition.

“Picking the garbage out of the [dumpsters] to make my art is a lot like people pulling the shoes from the spill out of the water,” Yoder says. “There is a silver lining to the cargo ship incident.”

“Overboard”​ is on view both in-person and virtually through March 6 at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. Each shoe is available for purchase for $795, and some of the proceeds will help benefit the museum.

Unpacking and Preserving William H. Johnson’s ‘Fighters for Freedom’ Series

Keara Teeter, Samuel H. Kress fellow in paintings conservation (2019–2020), has been hard at work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lunder Conservation Center , conducting a condition survey and conservation treatments of the Fighters for Freedom series in preparation for an upcoming traveling exhibition. Explore the series through her lens.

There are Americans who have spent their lives fighting for measurable change for civil rights issues. From artistic prints reproduced in William Still’s book, The Underground Rail Road (1886), to the 1940–1970s photojournalism of Gordon Parks , art has been a powerful tool to document, commemorate, and encourage change going forward. William H. Johnson’s Fighters for Freedom paintings reference images by Still, Parks, and others as a method of re-depicting important historical scenes and celebrating them through a new artistic medium.

William H. Johnson (1901–1970) was born in South Carolina and moved to New York City as a teenager. He financed his own training at the prestigious National Academy of Design and became one of their most talented students. His achievements, however, were not always recognized. In his final year at the Academy, Johnson was turned down from the school’s Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship. Outraged by this decision, one instructor personally fundraised $1,000 to finance Johnson’s travel to study in Paris. Beginning in France, the young artist lived and traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for over a decade before returning to the United States. By 1945, having determined to “paint his own people” Johnson began creating the Fighters for Freedom series, shining a light on luminaries including Frederick Douglass , Harriet Tubman , Crispus Attucks , and Mary McLeod Bethune . This series—along with over 1,000 of Johnson’s other drawings, paintings, and prints—and entered the national collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1967.

For my fellowship, I began surveying the entire series back in September and found that 26 of the 29 paintings in the series for the exhibition required conservation treatment. This was somewhat unsurprising given that, before coming to SAAM’s collection, the paintings had crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice. As an art conservator, it has been an exciting challenge to deal with the variety of condition issues from water staining to paint loss and structural damages in the solid supports (paperboard, plywood, Masonite, etc.). Each treatment is unique. I must carefully choose which conservation materials are appropriate and ask:

Treatment began by removing surface dirt and addressing major structural problems, such as replacing missing corners, stabilizing tears, and filling losses. Next, I turned to address aesthetic concerns such as retouching paint loss.

Beyond returning the paintings to their original appearance, the most fulfilling aspect in treating this series has been uncovering new information about the artist, his travels, and his use of materials. On the backside of some Johnson paintings, I found manufacturer's stamps (see image of Upson Board below) and shipping labels that were added during one of the artist’s transatlantic voyages. On the front of many artworks, I found sketches Johnson had added in graphite pencil before he began painting in color.

By preserving these artworks today, the artist’s message will continue to inspire future generations and elicit meaningful dialogue about the meaning of freedom. With the current Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd protests, I think about who else Johnson might have chosen to include in his Fighters for Freedom series if he were still alive today. Although my work with the Lunder Conservation Center is just one part of a larger story, preserving this influential series is a snapshot into the enduring power of art. To learn more about Johnson’s poignant artwork, read The Washington Post ’s recent article about SAAM’s Moon Over Harlem and the Archives of American Art Journal ’s 2019 article about SAAM’s William H. Johnson history paintings .

On November 5 at 5:30 ET , join Keara Teeter as she explains her conservation treatment of William H. Johnson’s iconic Fighters for Freedom paintings as part of SAAM's Converse with a Conservator series.

Why Elaine de Kooning’s Portrait of JFK Broke All the Rules

When artist Elaine de Kooning produced a painting for the Harry S. Truman Library, she said it was “not a portrait of John F. Kennedy but a glimpse.” Less than two years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination abruptly stole him from the nation, she said: “President Kennedy was never still. He slipped by us.”

De Kooning had been commissioned to paint JFK in 1962, and she spent several sessions with him in Palm Beach, beginning on December 28, 1962. At the time she said she preferred for her subjects to sit still, but Kennedy was constantly surrounded by activity. Her job was even more challenging because “every day he would look just a little bit different to her. His likeness was elusive for her,” says the Smithsonian’s Brandon Brame Fortune , chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery , where one of the portraits in her body of work on JFK now resides. De Kooning’s portrait is the subject of a recent podcast , “Painting through a President’s Assassination,” in the museum’s Portraits series. Fortune and the museum’s director Kim Sajet discuss this most unusual portrait of a U.S. president. The work, Sajet says, generates a lot of written comments from visitors to the museum: They either love it or they hate it.

During that first meeting in Palm Beach, “she was taken with the golden quality of the air,” says Fortune. She called him “incandescent.” She worked to capture Kennedy’s essence through several sittings. One day, she painted alongside five-year-old Caroline Kennedy and lost her focus when the child squeezed out an entire tube of paint.

When she returned to New York in the winter, her mental image of JFK seemed to slip away, so she began watching Kennedy on TV and in the newspaper. She tried to marry “that incandescent person she had seen in person—that personal experience that she had of being close to the man—with the black-and-white images that the public would see in the newspaper and on television because in some ways, she thought that by capturing all of that in one series of paintings, she could somehow capture this elusive person,” Fortune says.

Over the coming months, she filled her studio workspace with studies of Kennedy—drawings and paintings of different sizes. Then, when she learned that he had been killed, she, like many Americans, spent four days in front of the TV watching as a nation in mourning laid a president to rest. Again, during those long, dark days, she tried to capture the man she had drawn so many times, but afterward, she could not paint at all for months. The crushing reality of his loss made it impossible. “She was just so moved by the erasure of this man from the world that she had to stop,” says Fortune. De Kooning made faceless bronze busts of Kennedy during this period. She called them “portraits of grief.”

“Painting had become completely identified with painting Kennedy,” de Kooning said. “For an entire year, I painted nothing else.” When Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy, she was stopped in her tracks and saw no road forward. Over the course of 1964, a portion of her body of work on Kennedy was shown in New York, Philadelphia and Washington.

The commissioned body of work was unveiled at the Truman Library in 1965 and one, acquired in 1999, now hangs alongside other presidents in the National Portrait Gallery's "America's Presidents" exhibition.

De Kooning had clear ideas about her art. “The true portrait is full of reverence for the uniqueness for the human being portrayed,” she said. “Like falling in love, painting a portrait is the concentration on one particular person and no one else will do.” And as Fortune says, the artist fell in love with her most famous subject—JFK. After seeing him for the first time, Kennedy would become an obsession. She once even sculpted an image of him in wet sand on a beach. That Kennedy visage, like JFK himself, was short-lived. The high tide would wash it away.

She realized that her bright colors and heavy strokes had created a portrait that was probably out of place in the domain of Harry Truman, who preferred traditional art. At the unveiling, de Kooning said, “I hope that after a while, President Truman will get used to my portrait. I’m afraid it may take a bit of getting used to.” She told Truman, “This portrait is the culmination of a year of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life, and I’ve always been a hard worker.”

In a way, de Kooning’s difficulty in painting after Kennedy’s assassination reflects an emotional fog that gripped the entire nation in the days, weeks, and, months after the youngest man elected president disappeared from public life suddenly and shockingly. Even Kennedy’s political opponents felt the disconcerting nature of his loss. Kennedy’s image still burns brightly in American memory, and for an artist seeking to capture that image with lively energy, the shock was understandingly paralyzing.

She enjoyed portraying those elements that made each human being special. “I’m enthralled by the gesture of silhouette, the instantaneous illumination that enables you to recognize your father or a friend three blocks away,” she said.

De Kooning , who was an art critic and teacher as well as an artist, died in 1989. She first met her future husband and teacher Willem de Kooning in 1938. He tutored her in the observational skills that he had acquired at a Dutch art school, and they married in 1943. Her first solo exhibitions were in the 1950s. She utilized the techniques of abstract expressionism made famous by Jackson Pollock, her husband, and many others who drew public attention in the years after World War II. These artists, who clustered in New York City, provided a wide variety of art. What they shared was an affinity for abstraction that produced unrealistic images and offered a wide margin for artistic expression. They often used huge canvases and different forms of paint. De Kooning was pleased that the Kennedy White House approved of her selection to paint him, perhaps because this new art form reflected the energy powering JFK’s New Frontier into a future that would take men to the moon.

She did not limit her work to portraits, but she made a point of using men as the subjects of most of her portraits. “Her depiction of male sexuality upended the more typical scenario of male artist and female subjects and challenged contemporary gender power dynamics and male privilege,” according to an article from TheArtStory .

Her work has had a somewhat revolutionary impact at the National Portrait Gallery. The presidents who came before Kennedy are pictured formally in the “America’s Presidents” exhibit, a panoply of one dark-suited man after another.

One in De Kooning's series is a large, full-length painting filled with bold green and gold to reflect Kennedy’s dynamism. “It’s a riot of color and motion,” says Sajet. At the same time, the painting seems to convey Kennedy’s chronic back pain as he seems to balance his weight on the arm of the chair and appears ready to move, Fortune and Sajet agree.

His portrait “opened the door to all kinds of representations of the president that came afterward,” says Sajet. Some later leaders have appeared less formally and more colorfully. For instance, George W. Bush appears in casual attire, wearing neither a jacket or tie. Barack Obama wears a jacket as he sits before a background that is bursting with vibrant hues.

When she takes museum visitors to see “America’s Presidents,” Fortune says that “people sense the energy” of Kennedy’s portrait, and they often photograph it. “They want to capture all of that energy and take it away with them.”