Mary Blair, revisited
Looking forward to this show at the Walt Disney Family Museum. Here's my history with Mary Blair:
When I took on the Curator job at the Cartoon Art Museum (I'd been on staff for a few years already, and had assisted on most exhibitions), I had a few exhibitions lined up, maybe a year's worth, and I had a short list of proposals that I was slowly picking off. Political cartoon exhibitions, comic book shows, animation, notable anniversaries of comic strips, etc. One of the suggested topics was "Mary Blair." I asked Shaenon if she'd be interested in helping out with that one, and if I should pursue it, and she encouraged me to run with it.
I asked one of CAM's board members, a longtime Pixar staffer, who to talk to about Mary's work, and he put me in touch with Pete Docter. Pete put me in touch with Mary's son, Kevin. He'd apparently turned down exhibition requests before, but I must have said something that he liked, so he invited me and Shaenon to his house to look through his mother's archives.
We drove to Kevin's house and spent an amazing day looking through Mary's art, hearing stories about her work, stories about growing up in a Disney family, photographing art, taking notes, and (thanks to our rental car's battery running down) taking Kevin out to lunch while we waited on a recharge.
That led to a great 60-piece exhibition of Mary's work at the Cartoon Art Museum from 2007-08. A day or two before the exhibition opened to the public, Shaenon and I gave a private tour to Walt's daughter, Diane Disney Miller, whose Walt Disney Family Museum was about to open (facilitated by former CAM staffer Anel Muller). Diane told us stories about Walt, and Mary, and she absolutely loved the exhibition (and bought most of the artwork for the Disney Museum's collection after our show wrapped up).
A month or two later, I gave a tour of the exhibition to Koji Hoshino, president of Studio Ghibli, who was in the Bay Area visiting Pixar. Our opening reception was in December, and that was attended by Kevin Blair and his cousins, plus Pete Docter, and Pixar's Dice Tsutsumi, Enri Casarosa and Ronnie del Carmen, who talked to me about their own exhibition proposal based on an upcoming charity art auction called "The Totoro Forest Project," which was in the planning stages.
Before the exhibition concluded, Studio Ghibli informed me that they wanted to put together a massive Mary Blair retrospective for display at the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, featuring the entirety of Kevin Blair's collection, plus highlights from the Walt Disney Animation Research Library. Shaenon and I were tapped to facilitate things stateside, which meant that we'd take two extended trips to Japan--once to deliver art for the exhibition, once to bring it back.
Sadly, Kevin Blair passed away not long after the Cartoon Art Museum's Mary Blair retrospective. His cousins speculated that he may have known that his poor health was catching up to him, and that may have been part of the reason he was working so hard to get bring attention to his mother's work again.
The Japanese exhibition proceeded as planned, with Kevin's cousins (Mary's nieces) working alongside us to prepare the family's work for travel. Studio Ghibli and the Japanese television network NHK put together an incredible exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum, and we spent about three weeks in Japan in 2009, exploring Tokyo and the surrounding area, including unforgettable trips to the Ghibli Museum and studio.
The exhibition in Japan was a follow up to another Disney exhibition three years earlier, featuring an array of artists from the 1940s to 1960s. It was discovered that Mary's work was significantly more popular with visitors than any of the other artists, laying the foundation for a solo show of her work. Mary's solo show started off slowly, worrying the organizers, but word of mouth led to steady increases in attendance, and by the end of its run, Mary's exhibition surpassed the Disney group show by a healthy margin (and the vast majority of the visitors were female, probably 80-90%).
With Kevin's death, his cousins realized that the collection would be very cost-prohibitive for them to properly maintain, so they sold the Disney materials to Diane Disney Miller's Walt Disney Family Museum and Mary's personal art, advertisements and other works to the Ghibli Museum.
Five years later, Mary's getting a big show at the Walt Disney Family Museum, curated by John Canemaker, whose book The Art and Flair of Mary Blair helped seal our decision to put together a Mary Blair exhibition at the Cartoon Art Museum back in 2007. It's a small world, after all.