UPDATE: Reader Scott Valla suggests: “Everyone please stand in your yard on one leg for a moment of silence. (The photo above shows two of the flamingos Don donated to the Improbable Research museum.) Please think of Don, and raise a smile, whenever you see a flamingo, be it plastic or of some less physically durable species. Facebook gives people the power to share and.
Don featherstone professional#
Donald has more than 30 years of professional experience, including over. In 2012, Abigail Tucker wrote a history of the flamingo’s effect on the world, in Smithsonian magazine, with the headline “ The Tacky History of the Pink Flamingo.” Join Facebook to connect with Don Featherstone and others you may know. Donald Featherstone is a Senior Managing Director at Ankura and is based in London. It was “goofiest” and “tackiest” by Don’s own reckoning - he was a richly talented artist, but felt that, given the fame and financial security the flamingo brought him, he ought to publicly act as if he were interested only in making happy goofy, plastic art. One of those businesses produced this tribute/promotional video, in 2008:ĭon Featherstone was a happy, kind, and thoughtfully imaginative man, who became famous for his goofiest, tackiest creation. The flamingos also inspired the birth of several businesses that supply flamingoes en mass, as surprise visitors to the lawn of a beloved or despised neighbor. The flamingos inspired the film that launched John Waters‘s directorial career: Pink Flamingos.
Don featherstone movie#
In 2011, the flamingo attained new heights, when the Disney movie Gnomeo and Juliet featured a plastic pink lawn ornament named “Featherstone”. Don and Nancy were feted at the film’s premiere. After Don retired, dire things were done, by his successor, to the flamingo, triggering a worldwide protest, which eventually led to a more or less happy rallying of the forces of Good, and a restoration of the plastic pink flamingo’s status. The flamingo was one of his earliest efforts for the factory.Įventually he became president of the company. One of his first assignments was to create three-dimensional plastic lawn ornaments (up to that time, most plastic lawn ornaments were more or less flat). This photo shows Don and Nancy (who, every day of their marriage, wore matching outfits designed by Nancy) at the last of Don’s many happy returns, in 2012:ĭon created the flamingo when he was freshly graduated from art school, and newly employed at a plastics factory. He was a friend, whom we have known since 1996, the year he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for art.ĭon and his wife, Nancy Featherstone, came to almost every Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in succeeding years, where adoring throngs cheered them and the plastic pink flamingos. “The only way you could see my signature,” he once told Massachusetts’ Telegram & Gazette, “ is: Lay on your back and look up the butt of the flamingo.Don Featherstone, the creator of the plastic pink flamingo, died this morning.
The signed objects caused the designer to brag a little, but even then he didn’t take himself too seriously. On the 30th anniversary of his most famous creation, Featherstone agreed to cast his signature on it, which helped collectors distinguish the many imitations from the originals. In fact, the couple always dressed in matching outfits that she sewed.īesides his wife, he is survived by two children from a previous marriage, Harold Featherstone and Judith Nelson four grandchildren and two-great-grandchildren. He often wore flamingo-themed clothes, all made by Nancy, whom he married in 1976. Every summer, he and his wife would display 57 flamingos next to the driveway of their Victorian house. Don Featherstone was an American artist, inventor, and designer who was best known for creating the plastic pink flamingo. “It’s an honor,” Featherstone said of the Disney character, adding that it was “somewhat like me.”īut if anyone asked what he did for a living, “he never said anything about the pink flamingo,” said Nancy Featherstone, who described her husband as a humble man who never let his unusual success go to his head. This classic set of two Pink Flamingos has been imitated many times, however the original pair were designed by American artist Donald Don Featherstone in. The Smithsonian kept a pair, which Smithsonian magazine called “unlikely fixtures of a certain kind of high-end sensibility, a shorthand for tongue-in-cheek tackiness.”Īvant-garde filmmaker John Waters melted some in his 1972 classic about a drag queen, “Pink Flamingos.” Four decades later, Disney made a film about two garden gnomes who fall in love (2011’s “Gnomeo and Juliet”) and named the wisecracking plastic flamingo character after Featherstone. The pink plastic bird became embedded in American culture. He turned to National Geographic, which had run a feature on the creatures it called “Ballerinas in Pink.” After much study, Featherstone sculpted a male-female pair, one with its head erect and the other looking down. This time, Featherstone did not go find a live model.
His artificial duck was a hit and led Featherstone’s bosses to suggest a flamingo.
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