Alice Davis, Costume Designer for Disney Rides, Dies at 93

Alice’s mother encouraged her interest in art and unwittingly guaranteed the first notable recognition of her talent by telling a fib.

“She went back to work, and lied about my age so she could sign me up at the grammar school for kindergarten and she could get a job,” Ms. Davis — who was 5 at the time, not 6 as required — said in a 2016 interview with D23, the official Disney fan club. “That’s when I won the all-city painting competition for children in the Los Angeles school system.”

When Alice was about 12, the family moved again, this time to Long Beach, Calif. She graduated from high school there in 1947 and received a scholarship from a local arts group to attend the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now the California Institute of the Arts), a pipeline to Disney.

She had been fascinated with animation since seeing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” when she was 8 (“I just about vibrated out of my seat,” she said), and she hoped to pursue the form as a career.

But when she arrived at the institute, the founder, Nelbert Chouinard, told her that animation classes were open only to men.

“I said, ‘I can’t understand that,’” Ms. Davis recalled in the D23 interview. “‘I was raised to understand that if you were capable of doing a job, it didn’t matter whether you were male or female.’”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/arts/design/alice-davis-dead.html