100 Boots on Their Way to Church

Eleanor Antin initially presented 100 Boots as a series of postcards mailed to recipients across the United States, Europe, and Japan over a two-year span, culminating in an exhibition of the postcards at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1973. Each postcard image depicted the boots somewhere along their route from the Pacific Ocean to New York City, in the midst of such acts as “facing the sea” or “on their way to church.” While the arrangements of the boots often recall the repetitive forms of sculpture by her contemporaries, including Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, she uses photography to suggest a dynamic narrative surrounding the boots. This allows the artist to display her work in a variety of circumstances: as individual photographic prints to be viewed in a gallery, as postcards to be sent and received by mail, and as a published book cataloguing every image in the series.