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Pink yard flamingos2/11/2024 “It was in Jersey, for a family of art wholesalers. They said all we have is this one listing and I said let me go for the interview,” she recalls. “I had to pay my way through college, so I went to the guidance counselor and said I need a job with art. “She loved that place so much.”Īs for how she got into making custom frames, Dunlow says she was always an artist but fell into the field almost by accident. “To this day she’ll reminisce and start crying,” Dunlow shares. In an extension of the family’s love of Florida, Dunlow’s sister Joanne Zeliff also moved to Ocala and was the wildlife manager at the Silver Springs attraction for decades, until it became a state park. Silver Springs Blvd., was built on the site of the attraction property in the early 1980s. I thought for sure we would have come here, but we didn’t.” I remember when I was 5 years old, I got my Annie Oakley cowgirl outfit with my gun and holster. “We always came to Silver Springs but never went to Six Gun. And I go, ‘You know, you’re standing on Six Gun Territory property’ here in my store,” she offers. She also showcases reproductions of vintage post cards that show popular attractions such as the former Six Gun Territory, for which the shopping plaza is named, and which, ironically, she never visited. At the front of her shop is a display with a large photo showing her on a glass-bottom boat ride in 1962. A customer painted this for me on a turkey feather.”ĭunlow has fond memories of those family vacations, recalling frequent visits to the Silver Springs attraction. Spreading her arms wide and then picking up one item, she adds, “People love to bring me donations and gifts. So, I thought, well, I’ll let everybody else enjoy it, too, never thinking it would evolve into this.” “It is whimsical, it’s fun, it’s colorful. “People know I really love flamingos, but it didn’t really take off until, I think it was 2014, when I brought my collection into the shop,” she shares. None of the display items are for sale as “they are priceless,” she enthuses.ĭunlow says she started collecting items of the leggy avian species after her family visited Florida from their native New Jersey in the 1960s and she saw iconic pink images all over the Sunshine State. They range from a 5-foot stuffed bird to tiny statues, paintings, a crocheted pair of fledglings, images embossed on Christmas ornaments, coffee mugs and wine glasses, and even a commode. Many of the flamingos or related items were made for her by loved ones, friends and customers. Flamingos handmade for Cindy Dunlow.ĭunlow, who was “blinged out” for her Ocala Style photo session, with flamingo clothing, jewelry, and shoes, says she has no desire to attempt a new world record but still enjoys having visitors peruse the wide variety of flamingos in her museum. Her family continued her quest for the title after she passed away. The late Deborah Buscher Leck, of West Virginia, holds the new world record, as of 2019, with 2,595 items. There are so many of the iconic colorful and leggy birds nesting here that Dunlow once set a mark for flamingo-related items recognized by the Guinness World Records.ĭunlow calls her ever-growing brood “The Official Florida Flamingo Museum.” While it only took 793 items to set the Guinness record in 2016, her collection now numbers nearly 1,500 items. There is a floor-to-ceiling explosion of pink flamingos-which would be called a flamboyance in a natural setting-inside Cindy Dunlow Frames in the Six Gun Plaza in east Ocala. The flamingos were just one of more than 650 items Don created, but certainly the most memorable.“The Official Florida Flamingo Museum” is right here in Ocala. “Before that, only the wealthy could afford to have bad taste.”ĭon even decorated his lawn with 57 of his flamingos, marking the year of their creation.ĭon spent 43 years with Union Products, eventually rising to the position of president before his retirement in 1999. “We sold people tropical elegance in a box for less than $10,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 2007. On the 50th anniversary of their creation, Don was asked to explain the popularity of his flamingos. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts also had a pair of Don’s flamingos in their collection. In 1987, the governor of Massachusetts declared Don’s plastic flamingo “an essential contribution to American folk art.”Ī few years later, Don’s plastic pink flamingos began to appear in avant-garde art galleries, and by the late 1990s, were even being sold in the gift shop of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The signature that reveals an authentic ‘Featherstone’ flamingo
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