![]() Plastic pink flamingos were given as birthday, housewarming, and moving presents. During the 1980s, America’s love of the bird only grew with the popularity of television shows like Miami Vice. ![]() This was especially true in Miami Beach, a vacation destination for the wealthy for decades one of the first luxury hotels built there was The Flamingo. The pair of birds sold in the Sears catalog for $2.76 with simple instructions: “Place in garden, lawn, to beautify landscape.”Īmericans have long connected the flamingo to South Florida, where flamingos once lived in great numbers. They were three feet tall and intended to be sold as a pair-one stood upright and alert, the other stooped as if grazing. The result was a sculpted clay pair of Phoenicopterus Ruber Plasticus, as he later jokingly referred to his creations. Since using a live flamingo model was not an option, he worked from photographs in National Geographic. One of Featherstone’s first assignments was to sculpt a three-dimensional flamingo. These products appealed to homeowners of the postwar working class looking to add some flair to their property. When designer and sculptor Donald Featherstone graduated from the school of the Worcester Art Museum in 1957, he took a position at Union Products, a maker of plastic lawn ornaments in Leominster, Massachusetts. ![]() Is it kitsch, tacky, or a classic? In her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, nature writer Terry Tempest Williams declared that the plastic pink flamingo was “our unnatural link to the natural world.”
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