American Period Rooms: Inside/Out
The McFarlane Room, Boston, MA
2016
The MacFarlane Memorial Room is not actually a historic interior. The room was created in the mid-1970s to showcase hand-painted Chinese wallpaper donated by the McFarlane family. In 1982, Mia curators added a fireplace and woodwork copied from the historic 1796 Otis House in Boston. The period-appropriate furniture and a carpet add further context to the room. In his photograph, Marchetti reverses the direction of influence by covering the exterior of the Otis House in the MacFarlane Memorial Room’s exotic wallpaper. – Alex Bortolot