Portrait of a Good Boy

Curator's statement

Which one is the real Tofu?

For five hundred years, the portrait has made the same promise: this is what the sitter really looked like. Portrait of a Good Boy tests that promise on a dog.

At the center of the float, Tofu sits on a pedestal inside an ornate gold frame, wearing a burgundy robe in the manner of a seventeenth-century Dutch burgher. He is the painting. He is also the painter, the subject, and the reason the float stops every forty feet.

Around him hangs a salon wall of framed portraits. Each frame holds a stuffed-animal double, a plush stand-in for the artist. Up close they are obviously toys. From the curb, at walking speed, in a crowd, they are less obvious. Viewers are asked to find the real one. The real one is the one who has just noticed a hot dog.

The work borrows from the tableau vivant, the nineteenth-century parlor game in which people froze in poses copied from famous paintings. It also borrows from every museum gift shop that has ever sold a plush version of a masterpiece. Here the gift shop and the masterpiece share a float.