Hillary Clinton's sad, unused election night party confetti gets new life as beautiful art
For tens of millions of Americans, replaying Hillary Clinton's election night loss has become a traumatic tradition: they all have a story about where they were and what party favors they had to pack up.
Artist Bunny Burson was at Clinton's election night party in the Jacob Javits Center in New York the night her candidate lost. She remembers the evening painfully well. To commemorate the night and relieve at least some of her grief, Bunson decided to take the unused confetti from the canons and turn them into something, well, great: snow globes.
It might seem like an odd choice of materials as we typically associate snow globes with "delightful winter-based holidays" not "devastating national elections." For the artist, however, the use of confetti was purposeful: Each of those swirling confetti pieces represents one of the many issues we faced this election, including "human rights, women's rights" and, well, everything.
Burson told Mashable that she made sure that the confetti she used came from the election night party itself, going so far as to call the company storing the unused confetti and getting a signed statement from them.
Some of the "200 pounds of confetti" was used in a giant snow globe, positioned in a Missouri Gallery, while the rest will be incorporated into smaller snow globes for purchase. Burson is currently designing the smaller snow globes and plans to donate the proceeds to Planned Parenthood.
Bunson titled the project "Still I Rise" after the famous Maya Angelou poem, precisely because she wanted to emphasize resilience -- as well as grief -- in her work.
This isn't the first time Burson channeled her political grief into art, though.
She previously served on the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities under President Bill Clinton’s administration, and knew Al Gore and Tipper Gore well. After Gore lost in 2000, Burson decided to turn some of those famous hanging chads into art. For Burson, the two elections shared so much in common, even though this one dug deeper, felt darker.
However you feel about snow globes sold as Christmas trinkets -- and I must admit, I'm partial to the snowman aesthetic -- it's novel to take something so commercialized and make it actually meaningful.
You can check out more of Burson's work here. "And Still I Rise" will be on display at the Bruno David Gallery in Clayton, Missouri until August 12.
Topics Hillary Clinton
Heather was the Web Trends reporter at Mashable NYC. Prior to joining Mashable, Heather wrote regularly for UPROXX and GOOD Magazine, was published in The Daily Dot and VICE, and had her work featured in Entertainment Weekly, Jezebel, Mic, and Gawker. She loves small terrible dogs and responsible driving. Follow her on Twitter @wear_a_helmet.
