For nearly 60 years, the It’s a Small World ride has delighted (and tortured) Disneyland guests. But no matter how you feel about the titular tune, the staying power of the attraction’s whimsical, colorful look is undeniable. And that’s all thanks to designer Mary Blair.

A Bay Area-raised artist, Blair created head-turning concept art for classic animated features like “Cinderella” and “Peter Pan” and was later immortalized as a Disney Legend. The art director is finally being given the proper retrospective treatment with the Walt Disney Family Museum’s “Mary Blair: Mid-Century Magic” (May 22–Sept. 7).

Housed in one of the unassuming brick barracks on the Presidio’s Main Post, the Walt Disney Family Museum is a hidden gem of the Bay Area not unlike Blair herself. In 2014, the museum, which was co-founded by Napa transplant Diane Disney Miller, daughter of Walt Disney, hosted one of its most successful exhibitions to date: “MAGIC, COLOR, FLAIR: the world of Mary Blair.” But this 2025 “reimagining,” as the museum’s executive director, Kirsten Komoroske, put it, is a decidedly fresh look at Blair’s entire career from her time as a Bay Area student-artist through the many phases of her Disney days.

While Walt Disney’s ties to the Bay Area are somewhat tenuous though he did visit Children’s Fairyland in Oakland for inspiration Blair grew up in Morgan Hill during the 1920s. In 1929, a year after Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” made a splash in theaters, Blair began her studies at what was then San Jose State College. Although “Mid-Century Magic” contains nearly 150 artworks and historical photos, the pieces from her earlier, pre-Disney years are of particular importance to the exhibition.

Museum co-founder Miller was an avid collector of Blair’s work, but even she didn’t have access to some of the pieces that reaffirm the artist’s connection to Northern California. “The [curatorial] team went down there and did some remarkable research alongside the university’s librarians, which is when they came across [an old] cover to the school’s journal, the Quill, that Mary created,” Komoroske explained at a media preview of the exhibition.

For fans of the Walt Disney Family Museum’s permanent collection, the parallels between Disney’s and Blair’s arcs as fledgling artists are clear. Since the museum opened in 2009, visitors have long been able to view pages from the Voice, the McKinley High School newspaper that Disney was a cartoonist for during his teenage years, as well as the entrepreneur’s earliest-known drawing of Mickey Mouse. Now, Blair’s earliest-known works are making an appearance.

The sketches and cover art that the then-20-year-old Blair created for the Quill were bolder and visually distinct from those found in and on previous iterations of the journal. Now known as Reed Magazine, the literary journal still offers an annual Mary Blair Award for Art to its contributors, acknowledging the artist’s formative connection to the school and the Bay Area at large.

However, there’s a reason the Disney Legend’s ties to the Bay Area remain relatively unexplored. When Blair attended San Jose State College during the 1930s, graduation records were kept by hand. The museum’s curatorial team eagerly looked for the artist’s name at that time, she was going by her given name, Mary Robinson but couldn’t find her record. Further research revealed that Blair left to pursue an arts-focused education at the Chouinard Art Institute.

Notably, the Los Angeles-area art school was also where Disney trained (and found) many of his animators ahead of 1937’s mega-hit “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” Hollywood’s first feature-length animated film. While Blair didn’t join Disney’s studio until 1940, she made an undeniable impression on her fellow artists when she arrived. “Mary was the first artist I knew of to have different shades of red next to each other,” Frank Thomas, one of Disney’s then-leading animators, famously recalled. “You just didn’t do that! But Mary made it work.”

Komoroske echoed the sentiment shared by Disney’s pantheon of animators, many of whom are quoted in the exhibition space. “I think Walt saw a real talent in her. Even though it wasn’t in keeping with a lot of the art at the studio at the time, I think he really liked her whimsical style.”

That whimsical style and bold colors are what most Disney fans associate with Blair. In many ways, the artist introduced Disney both the man and the studio to a more modernist art style. Rich with color and impressionistic in a midcentury sort of way, Blair’s concept art for the Disney films of the 1950s injected a new, much-needed sense of magic into the onscreen stories. The almost-surreal soap bubbles in “Cinderella,” the night skies of “Peter Pan” and pretty much anything in Alice’s trip through Wonderland benefit from Blair’s singular artistic touches.

It’s hard to understate the Bay Area artist’s importance to the Disney Co. as a whole. During the height of World War II, Blair famously joined Disney and his team on a “goodwill tour” of South America and, soon after, used the artistic inspiration she gathered from the trip to help the studio regain its footing.

While works from the 1940s and ’50s appear in “Mid-Century Magic,” the exhibition is most compelling because of the way it contrasts Blair’s early work as a San Jose-based student with her later design work. After a stint as a freelancer, Blair reteamed with Disney ahead of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair. No one else could have brought It’s a Small World to life, after all. As art director, Blair oversaw the creation of the animatronic-filled boat ride, from its children’s book-inspired feeling to the now-famous moving façade. This success led Blair to conceive murals and other elements for the parks in both Anaheim and Orlando, Florida.

As mandated by its founder, the Walt Disney Family Museum has featured many of the artists and creatives who helped build Disney’s success. Funnily enough, quite a few other past honorees also have formative Bay Area ties. In addition to Blair, the museum has spotlighted Eyvind Earle, a Carmel-by-the-Sea local who created the distinct look of “Sleeping Beauty,” and Tyrus Wong, who immigrated to the US via San Francisco Bay’s Angel Island and, later, shaped the watercolor-inspired feel of “Bambi.”

“Honoring those unsung heroes is really the core of what we’re trying to do,” Komoroske noted. “When visitors and students in the museum’s education program see Mary Blair’s work, see that she didn’t conform but still created unbelievable work that lives on in Disney films and at the parks, we’re hoping that will be inspiring.”