This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on October 14, 2025. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.
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Review: The Mint Museum’s ‘Future Now’ and ‘Central Impact’ exhibits mesh innovation with nostalgia to create bold expressions in the form of sneakers and skateboards
by Lawrence Toppman
Send a guy in his 70s to look at sneakers and skateboard art, and you’re likely to get wheezy anecdotes about a childhood before skateboards were first mass-produced (1959), when his parents had to buy him Keds footwear—then often called “tennis shoes”—because they couldn’t afford Chuck Taylor All Stars.
Those memories did float through my brain as I entered The Mint Museum Randolph last weekend. But “Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks” and “Central Impact: Skateboarding’s Art and Influence,” both on display through Jan. 4, immediately yanked me into the present and, in the former case, hurled me beyond it.
You could actually skateboard around “Central Impact,” assuming you smuggled in a set of wheels; it’s mounted on the outer walls of the Van Every Forum downstairs, in three-quarters of a circle. “Future Now” takes up all the traveling exhibition space upstairs, and you’ll spend more time there if you want to see everything.
I stumbled upon Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum, surely the world’s greatest footwear collection, four years after it opened in 1995. So I was delighted to learn the five dozen pairs in “Future Now” were curated by Bata director Elizabeth Semmelhack, mostly from her own museum.
As the wall text tells us, 20 billion pairs of shoes—two and a half for every human on the planet—get made every year, most so cheaply that they soon get tossed away. So it’s fascinating to see shoes too valuable, ergonomically desirable or beautifully crafted to be destined for scrap heaps.
The exhibit breaks down roughly into footwear that’s innovative, sustainable or transformative—even in the virtual realm, where a robotic VR boot prototype has wheels and soles that rotate so a VR viewer can move smoothly in all directions.
Practicality is seldom the point. (No prices are listed, and didn’t I want them!) Comfort isn’t always the point. Durability may be, but isn’t necessarily, the point. Cool is the point. The last gallery, the most futuristic one, especially relies on the “If I can build it, why not?” idea.
Nobody needs huge, cartoonish red boots that make them look like Astro Boy, Crocs with tiny New York City landmarks projecting from them or Beth Levine’s “No shoes,” high-heeled soles without any other parts except adhesive pads to attach them to your feet. But they’re cool.
People do need shoes that help them, whether sneakers with self-tying “laces” for those who are disabled (you’ll find the prototype for Marty McFly’s “Back to the Future” footwear), to the Zvezdochka, a shoe with four components that come apart and can be replaced individually without glue, so you don’t have to dump the whole shoe. (Seen any of these in stores? Me either. What manufacturer wants to make shoes that don’t completely wear out?)
The unsung hero of the exhibit is Jan Ernst Matzeliger, a mixed-race inventor (Dutch father, mother a descendant of African slaves) whose automatic lasting machine revolutionized the industry by making it possible to mass-produce 150 to 700 pairs a day, rather than 50. Pensole created the snazzy JEM sneaker to honor him with his picture on every sole—an interesting twist, as mass production is what made cheap shoes disposable and wasteful in the first place.
I was happiest among the shoes made of factory-grown mushroom “leather” (mycelium), discarded gill nets, recycled polyester and rubber scraps, re-used jeans and other workwear, even parts from cast-off sneakers. The sneaker future for the rich is in fabulous design and scarcity; for the rest of us, it’s in low-pollution production and long-term utility.
The skateboard exhibit had a different appeal: The boards were exactly the same length and width to the naked eye, but they differed widely in imagery. Black Sheep Skate Shop, which sits in an unassuming building near the corner of Central and Lamar avenues, and Deckaid, which is dedicated to promoting skateboard deck art (where the feet go), curated this exhibit.
Black Sheep has positioned itself as a “core skateboard shop” that not only offers boards but shoes, clothing and accessories, often in partnership with nationally known brands such as Nike and Adidas. Fittingly, some decks pay tribute to Black Sheep, from one where a lone black sheep walks confidently away from a puzzled white flock to another where a smiling black lamb perches atop a pile of human skulls and bones and declares, “See you in hell.”
At first, the exhibit seems to suggest that boarders, like bikers, not only welcome outlaw status but seek it. Yet for every snarling gray wolf or demon, for every tribute to loners ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to Han Solo, you’ll find tender or humorous illustrations: Piglet tripping and bursting Eeyore’s birthday balloon, giddy Smurfs, a smiling pizza delivery guy, Christopher Robin playing Poohsticks with Edward Bear. Don’t judge too quickly. (In fact, confronted by Debbie Harry next to a human skull filled with Campbell’s soup and a banana, I couldn’t judge at all.)
My favorite collection of decks consisted of 14 depicting a lower-middle-class neighborhood, presumably in New York. Multiple artists combined to show exteriors in the first seven, interiors of the same buildings in the next seven: a warm-hearted mural of life in a hustling town.
No skateboarding exhibit would be complete without videos. This one ends with a silent bank of 24 screens showing footage from the last 40 years: boarders in streets, in skate parks, shooting down steps, performing stunts. I had to watch all of them to find one guy who tried to pull off a difficult move and went wheels over teakettle onto the pavement. At last, I could identify.
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If you’re going
“Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks” and “Central Impact: Skateboarding’s Art and Influence” both run through Jan. 4 at The Mint Museum Randolph, 2730 Randolph Road
Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.
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