Living Here

Michael A. Rippens
Dancing Shoes, 2021
Wood, paint, wire, plastic
Courtesy of the artist

This work is part of the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025.

“Although I’ve come to appreciate this early engagement with my heritage and culture, being forced by my parents to put on a plaid shirt and neck scarf and perform Filipino folk dances seemed extremely uncool at the time.” In Dancing Shoes, Michael Rippens reflects on his childhood experience performing Tinikling, a traditional dance where bamboo poles are clapped together in a rhythmic beat. He recalls it was often painful—both physically, as his feet were often caught between the heavy poles, and socially, as a junior high kid in Los Angeles navigating the challenge of fitting in with his peers. For this work, Rippens altered a wooden relief of young Tinikling dancers, a common decoration in Filipino households. He hand-carved sneakers for each figure, outfitting their bare feet in brand-name shoes that were popular when he was growing up. The bamboo poles were replaced with jump ropes, giving the impression that the dancers were just regular American kids having fun on a playground. “The changes I made to the original sculpture allude to the internal conflicts and contradictions I felt as a child navigating a hybrid identity.”