“Pies,” a 1961 painting by Wayne Thiebaud.
Before we return to our seasonal mission of preparing pies to resemble this delicious Wayne Thiebaud canvas, we offer up a giant slice of banana-cream thanks to you, dear readers, for joining us through another year of news, events, books, films, and curiosities in the world of design, art, and visual culture. May your Thanksgiving be restful, well-designed, and full of pie. And while you go about your own holiday preparations–redoing the placecards that your well-meaning aunt chose to print in Comic Sans, switching out the pilgrim-themed Ziggy napkins, discussing why the term “doorbuster” is not to be uttered in your presence–be sure to keep one eye on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which this year debuts a balloon designed by KAWS.
Macy’s tapped the New Jersey-born artist, also known as Brian Donnelly, to create the new addition to its “Blue Sky Gallery” series that has sent aloft the work of artists such as Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Tom Otterness. Donnelly saw his “Companion” character, the first toy he ever made, as ripe for transformation into 40 feet of inflatable, urethane-coated nylon. “I like taking an image and reworking it and having it made in new ways and materials, and communicating in different ways,” he told us earlier this year. And Donnelly is already thinking about the bashful balloon’s future. “Macy’s archives all of the balloons. They have every one that they’ve made since the 1930s, at least those that haven’t totally deteriorated,” he said. “My hope is that in ten or fifteen years, they do something where they show all of the artists’ balloons together.”
(Photo: Taylor Hill/Getty Images North America)
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