A 10-foot-tall sculpture made of 2,000 cast-aluminum high-heeled shoes is packing up and leaving its longtime perch outside Caleres headquarters in Clayton, bound for a new life greeting travelers at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The footwear company is donating the piece, known as “Shoe of Shoes,” to the airport, which plans to spend $15,000 to move, clean and power-wash the sculpture before installing it on a grassy area west of the exit doors on the lower level.
The move comes as Caleres clears out of its nine-acre campus at 8300 Maryland Avenue. In 2024, Caleres proposed selling the nine-acre campus to the School District of Clayton, according to KSDK. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis is under contract to purchase a 6.67-acre parcel there for a planned new performing arts center, with due diligence and closing still pending, according to Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Caleres is relocating its own headquarters just two blocks east, into two connected office buildings at 8182 Maryland Avenue and 8235 Forsyth Boulevard that will be known as Caleres Center, according to Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. With no room for the giant shoe sculpture at the new leased offices, the company turned to the airport as a place to display it. As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the sculpture has become a recognizable piece of public art tied to both Caleres and the broader St. Louis business community.
A Shoe With Its Own Exhibition History
“Shoe of Shoes” was created by artist Victoria Fuller in 1999 and first appeared publicly that year at the Pier Walk exhibition on Navy Pier in Chicago, according to CanvasRebel Magazine. The piece measures 10 feet high and 11 feet long, built from cast aluminum shaped into a towering high heel made up of roughly 2,000 individual shoes, per Fuller's own description of the work on her website. Fuller holds a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has completed public art commissions for agencies including Seattle's Sound Transit and St. Louis's Bi-State Development Agency, according to the Susquehanna Art Museum.
Per the Post-Dispatch's reporting, the sculpture later made its way to the St. Louis City Museum, where it was displayed as part of that museum's 2000 art exhibition before moving to Caleres' Clayton office once its run there ended. It has sat on that Clayton lawn ever since, becoming something of a local landmark outside the company's headquarters.
Joining Another Donated Landmark at the Airport
At Lambert, the shoe sculpture will be installed near “Sensación de Vuelo” (Flying Sensation), a 10-foot-tall polished steel ribbon sculpture by Mexican artist Leonardo Nierman that was donated to the city in 2011 to mark the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, according to the City of St. Louis. Lambert's airport art advisory committee recommended accepting the shoe sculpture donation, and the airport commission has since approved the donation agreement, per the Post-Dispatch. Beyond moving and cleaning the piece, the airport plans to install signage explaining the sculpture's history for passengers passing through.
The St. Louis Lambert International Airport Art & Culture Program manages permanent and rotating exhibitions across both terminal concourses, reaching an estimated audience of more than 16 million passengers annually, according to the airport's own program description.
A Nod to St. Louis's Shoemaking Past
The sculpture's relocation lands amid a notable chapter of St. Louis industrial history. The Post-Dispatch reports that St. Louis-based firms collectively manufactured 60 percent of the nation's shoes and employed 18,500 local workers, operating out of what is now the former International Shoe Building on Washington Avenue in St. Louis. More broadly, the city was once home to roughly 150 individual shoe companies, a legacy that places “Shoe of Shoes” squarely within the region's manufacturing identity rather than as a standalone curiosity.
Caleres itself carries that history under a newer name. The company was formerly known as Brown Shoe Company, according to Caleres Inc. Today the company generated approximately $2.8 billion in net annual sales in fiscal year 2023 across a portfolio that includes Famous Footwear, Naturalizer, Sam Edelman, Vionic and Allen Edmonds, according to Umbrex Consulting. As Caleres closes the book on its decades-long presence at 8300 Maryland Avenue, the giant shoe sculpture is set to carry that legacy forward in a far more public setting, greeting travelers arriving in and departing from St. Louis.
