Creator, ICE Ghost Shoes 26, St. Paul
When Laura Migliorino visited the Art Institute of Chicago at six years old, she announced, “This is where I want to go to school.” And that’s what she did.
Her father was a musician, her mother “a great steward of history,” and Laura has always been an artist.
“By and large, my work has always had a subtle or not-so-subtle social political component,” she says. “Not in your face. I love that work; it’s just not what I do. I’ve always liked to create images or works of art that are beautiful. My approach happens to be a little more subtle, like peeling a candy wrapper and it’s a delicious piece of medicine. It’s going to make you feel better.
“If you met me in the ’80s, I had a purple mohawk. Studded jewelry, total punk rocker moved to New York.
“I think some of the most powerful work I did was around the AIDS epidemic,” she adds. “My brother died in 1994. And I, somebody who went to art school and somebody who was in New York, lost more people than I can count.”
Laura was drawn to the ways that art can honor and memorialize loss. In the midst of Operation Metro Surge, she saw her art community respond.
Creator, ICE Ghost Shoes 26, St. Paul
“People were pumping out banners, buttons, flyers, messaging, puppets, I mean, everything. And that messaging was very important because we all had something that we could do.”
Laura received funding from Forecast Public Art to create ICE Ghost Shoes 26, a project that placed shoes painted white at the locations where people were “killed, abducted, and traumatized by Metro Surge.”
More than 100 pairs of shoes were placed in the Twin Cities metro area and the project continues to grow through a team of volunteers throughout Minnesota.
It’s a project that has been inspired by other art projects Laura has encountered.
The stumbling blocks, or Stolpersteine, are a collection of more than 100,000 bricks installed in the pavement throughout Europe. Created by German artist Gunter Demnig, the markers are meant to make people pause to consider the Holocaust history at that site.
And along the banks of the Danube in Budapest, 60 pairs of empty metal shoes mark the site where thousands were shot during the winter of 1944-45, primarily Hungarian Jews.
“And that’s where I got this idea of the ICE ghost shoes.” Laura says. “Sort of a combination of what I saw in Europe, particularly the Danube, and ghost bikes that we periodically see around cities where somebody died while they were riding their bicycle. And I was thinking well, how are we going to mark this for future generations?”
“If you don’t control your own story, and if you don’t control your own narrative, you will not exist. And you have to claim your voice.”
Why shoes?
“One, it’s sort of iconic. Walk in someone’s shoes. Stand in my shoes. Lift yourself up by your bootstraps.
“Shoes are really intimate. They form to your body in a way that other clothes might not. But also, I come from a line of Italian shoemakers. So I’m a shoe junkie. My parents are shoe junkies. Shoes are a big deal in our family lore.
“My grandfather Pasquale, when he immigrated, he came to work in Cleveland with his uncle Emilio in the shoe shop. And then when my grandfather went back to Italy to marry my grandmother, everybody talked about how he showed up in these orange suede shoes that he made.
“And so shoes have a personal connection for me, but I also think there is sort of a general sort of lore around shoes that are very powerful.”
What did that season feel like in the Twin Cities?
“It’s hard to try and get people to understand how bad every day was.
“We’re in the North Loop and by something we don’t understand, our neighborhood was not hard hit, which surprised us. So we were in the trenches every day…seeing what we could do. Volunteer. We started a bridge brigade in the North Loop. So every Sunday afternoon, we went over to this bridge and put up our signs. And we just hemorrhaged money. Anybody who needed money, we were donating money.
“I had my whistle. I had my passport. I had a burner phone. And every day I would look at the ICEout.org map and see how to get to and from anywhere. So to the grocery store, to the studio, we hardly went out. It was like COVID, but with absolute terror.
I mean, God, people were murdered in places where we are at all the time. When Renee Good was murdered, I was playing pickleball. It came up over the screen and I could see a friend of mine outside, like it happened right in front of my friend’s house.
What art can do:
“When I taught art for 37 years, I also taught the intro to art history course.
“And a lot of students were like, well, why is this important? And my answer to everybody is that when we’re all gone, it’s the art, architecture, music, and literature that is left to tell your story.
“We don’t go to Rome to read the Senate notes. We go to Rome to see the sculptures. We go to Rome to see Constantine’s arch. We go there for the Colosseum.
“We go for the art, architecture, music, poetry. That’s the legacy that’s left behind. When you have a culture that doesn’t value the art, the story is never told. This is it. So when we’re gone, this is what’s left. This is what tells our story.”
How do you hope the world sees Minnesota?
“I travel a lot. We spend a lot of time in London where I do a lot of work. And the most phenomenal thing about what happened to us is now people around the world know where Minneapolis is, or know where Minnesota is.
“I was in a bar with a friend of mine, and she was asking me, ‘How was it?’ So I started talking about it. And people from adjacent tables pulled their chairs up, and they were like, ‘You’re from Minneapolis?’
“A lot of people said, ‘How did you do it?’ And the answer—and this is the answer I think everybody from Minnesota gives—we didn’t do anything different. We didn’t do anything that we wouldn’t normally do.
“And they’re like, huh?
“I said, that’s how it works up there. You look after your neighbor. You don’t ask a question. If there’s a guy and the truck is in the snowbank, and they have a Trump sticker on it, everybody’s still going to get out and they’re going to push it. You get out, you push it.
“You shovel your neighbor’s sidewalk. If your neighbor isn’t feeling well, you check on them. What I want people to know about Minnesota is that we look after our neighbors, our friends, people we don’t even know. We take care of them because they’re humans. I want everybody to do this.
“It’s not complicated. It doesn’t take much to put a bag of groceries on your neighbor’s porch because they can’t get out. And we didn’t do anything different. We did what we always do, look out for our neighbor. And what a world it would be if everybody modeled Minnesota behavior in this regard. Just be nice to each other.
“It’s not that hard. It’s not complicated. It’s easy.”
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
North Star Way: Minnesota navigates a harsh winter
To listen to our podcast series, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interviews, photos, and text: John Noltner
Editing: Barry Yeoman
Editing and production: Razik Saifullah, Nick Theisen
Music: Dan Rodriguez
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