Maybe it’s the woman’s mischievous look. Or something to do with clowns. But there’s a portent about this image—you sense the innocent child will somehow vanish behind the frame, as though passing through a portal. A trick of Edgar Allan Poe’s imagination.
The woman was facilitating make-believe—pretend you’re a painting!—with a stash of dress-up clothes at Mia’s 1981 Rose Fete. The Rose Fete was a popular annual carnival held on the museum lawn in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. It was inspired by a famously over-the-top—and far less populist—party with the same name, held on the museum grounds in 1892 when they were still part of the Morrison estate, known as Villa Rosa.
The Rose Fete activities were rather indiscriminate family fare. A team of blacksmiths, wearing T-shirts that said “Hot Iron Demonstration Team,” pounding metal in portable forges. A fashion show. A bouncy house.
Dressed as art in Mia in 1986 (top) and in 1993.
The parties stopped in the 1990s. But the impulse to dress as art seems timeless. The art comes alive, sometimes spookily so, a kind of roguish verisimilitude. To enact the art is to bring it down to earth, a rather neat and naughty party trick.