![]() ![]() But a few years later the Cado Company, of Fitchburg, Mass., acquired the rights to the Union Products line. Union Products ceased operations in 2006, prompting widespread fear that Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus would become extinct. He was the author, with Tom Herzing, of a 1999 photographic book, The Original Pink Flamingos: Splendor on the Grass. That year he became the president of Union Products, serving until his retirement in 2000. Featherstone was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize, an annual satirical award honoring outré contributions, in 1996. In 2009, after a debate of five minutes, the Common Council, as the city council of Madison, Wis., is known, voted 15 to 4 to designate the pink plastic flamingo the city’s official bird.Įlsewhere, however, some homeowners’ associations banned the creature, deeming it a despoiler of property values.īut the response was far more often celebratory, as typified by the director John Waters’s Pink Flamingos, the 1972 gallows comedy starring the vast drag queen Divine, or, more conventionally, Gnomeo & Juliet, Disney’s animated feature of 2011, which features a pink-flamingo character, voiced by Jim Cummings, named Featherstone.įor his work, Mr. Featherstone’s bird inflamed passions pro and con. Featherstone, every day from the late 1970s onward, many of them in flamingo-patterned fabric.) (To anyone even vaguely acquainted with the Featherstones, the question would have been unnecessary: In an act of connubial solidarity, they wore matching outfits, handmade by Mrs. “Someone did that?” came the reply, as if the bird, like its flesh-and-blood antecedent, was a product of Darwinian evolution. Featherstone’s creation had become could be found in the response his wife, Nancy, often got when she told people what he had invented. Featherstone’s flamingo blew his duck out of the water.Īn index of its novelty that first year could be found in the Sears catalog, which offered the birds for $2.76 a pair but saw fit to include instructions: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.”Īn index, years later, of how deeply ingrained Mr. ![]() With its insouciant stance and saturated pink promise of endless summer, Mr. Working from photographs in National Geographic, he created a three-foot-high creature, typically sold as one of a pair: one bird upright, the other head down, as if grazing. Featherstone went out and bought a live one, keeping it tenderly in the sink as he copied it before releasing it in a local park. To sculpt his first assignment, a three-dimensional duck, Mr. He graduated from the school of the Worcester Art Museum in 1957, and that year, to the chagrin of his professors and the gratification of his creditors, he took a job with Union Products, a maker of plastic lawn ornaments in Leominster, Mass. A recent art-school graduate, he was simply heeding career advice that would become a sardonic watchword for young people: Plastics.ĭonald Featherstone was born on Jan. Featherstone had not contemplated creating an enduring emblem of kitsch in 1957, when his first flamingo sailed off the assembly line, or the next year, when the bird was brought to market. Less hideous than a garden gnome, more diplomatic than a lawn jockey, the plastic flamingo has been flaunted in front yards by the millions feted in films, on television and in song and held up as an object of impassioned pride and equally impassioned prejudice. ![]() askART lists Don Featherstone in 0 of its research Essays.ĭon Featherstone has 0 artist signature examples available in our database. Galleries and art dealers listing works of art by Don Featherstone as either "Wanted" or "For Sale" There are 0Īrtworks for sale on our website by galleries and art dealers askART's database currently holds 0 auction lots for Don Featherstone (of whichĠ auction records sold and 0 are upcoming at auction.)Īrtist artworks for sale and wanted. Less hideous than a garden gnome, more diplomatic than a lawn jockey, the plastic flamingo has been flaunted in front yards by the millions feted in films, on television and in song and held up as an object of impassioned pride and equally impassioned pr He named it Phoenicopterus ruber plasticus. Featherstone, a sculptor who died on Monday at 79, was the inventor of the pink plastic flamingo, that flagrant totem of suburban satisfaction and, in later years, postmodern irony. Featherstone did nearly six decades ago - in the process indelibly altering the landscape of midcentury America - was to cast the creature in plastic and attach slender, rodlike legs for planting it in the ground. Don Featherstone is known for Design creator of pink flamingo yard ornaments, sculpture.įollowing is The New York Times obituary.ĭon Featherstone, Inventor of the Pink Flamingo (in Plastic), Dies at 79ĭon Featherstone did not invent Phoenicopterus ruber: Nature took care of that eons ago. ![]() Don Featherstone (1936 - 2015) was active/lived in Massachusetts. ![]()
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