Let the Festivities Begin: Processions, Parades, and Other Forms of Collective Celebration in Contemporary Art

On the morning of June 23, 2002, a strange procession leaves the New York Museum of Modern Art, crosses Queensboro Bridge, and arrives at the museum’s temporary venue in Queens. The event has all usual ­accoutrements of a parade: a brass band made up of around a dozen Peruvian musicians, a horse, dogs, close to a hundred participants, including children, floats topped with replicas of masterpieces from the MoMA collection—Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, Duchamp’s ­readymade Bicycle Wheel, Giacometti’s Femme debout n^o 2—, and artist Kiki Smith herself, raised like a “living icon,” or the statue of the Virgin in a religious procession. It all takes place in a festive atmosphere and, along the way, a hundred or so bystanders join the festivities to swell the crowd at this public event.