Asaxanthin FeatherstoneCreated for the 2016 Plains Art Museum Gala, celebrates the always iconic and often ironic lawn flamingo.
In the beautiful tropics flamingos' feathers are colored by the tasty crustaceans in their diet, which contain a pink pigment called astaxanthin. Those of us lucky enough to live in the northern states get our flamingos by way of Leominster, Mass. the "Plastics Capital of the World!" Designed by Don Featherstone, a sculptor in their employ, these pink pigment infused polyethylene fowl cheered many post-war lawns (and had the added benefit of helping folks find their houses in the newly built suburbs) starting in 1957. They were a strait-forward effort at neighborhood beautification; they were Innocent. Regrettably those tropically elegant birds very quickly became essentially extinct, re-classified as "tacky" and "unnatural." Thankfully the flamingo, pheonixlike, just as quickly rose again from its molten remains, assisted by artists such as Andy Warhol, Klaus Oldenburg and even John Waters, who brought them back as loaded objects. It seems fitting now that in my urban studio, in what once was the home of a catalog company that shipped flamingos around the world, I have created a flamingo to grace a modern garden, hopefully without irony. For more info about the Plains Art Museum Gala go to:
http://plainsart.org/spring-gala-1976/ |