Art by the slice
Hideaway holiday boxes to feature local art
If you’re looking for a local artist’s work to hang on your wall, it’s yours to be had for the price of a large pizza this holiday season.
Hideaway Pizza will roll out its first-ever Happy Hideaways box on Nov. 20, and this year’s will feature artist Sam Washburn’s work.
Washburn’s illustrations have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The St. Louis Beacon, on book covers and in various other formats.
He’s been working on the Hideaway pizza box project for about a
year. And while he’s not an Oklahoma native, he’s lived here for about five years and is a die-hard lover of the restaurant’s pizza.
Washburn’s pizza box art highlights all the traditional holiday season events, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s Day.
It includes a various characters holding slices of pizza on the box, including a snowman wearing a Santa hat, a turkey with a slice of vegetarian pie (of course, turkeys don’t eat meat), a New Year’s baby and a handsome version of Hideaway’s mascot, Kahuna, sporting made-over hair, dressed in a tuxedo and wearing a puffy bow tie.
Falling snow and dreidels also are depicted as part of the art.
Promoting culture through art
Rob Crissinger, Hideaway’s spokesman, said 30,000 large pizza boxes are being produced for its 17 restaurants to use as part of the promotion.
Crissinger said the restaurant’s owners created the Happy Hideaways promotion to boost awareness of the restaurant’s efforts to give back to the community, particularly to causes that use creativity to promote education and culture.
Hideaway supports a variety of charities through donations, and also offers organizations benefit nights where a portion of sales are donated back to the groups to support them.
So why use the cover of a large pizza box as a place to feature the art?
“It is our most important piece of our marketing puzzle because we go through so many, and because they are in so many people’s homes,” Crissinger said.
“Whatever is on that box top is the central focus for us at that time.”
Restaurants will roll it out to patrons on Nov. 20, the same day it introduces its prime rib holiday pizza and more actively promotes hide away pizza. shop, where patrons can buy Hideaway apparel online.
Crissinger said there should be enough boxes to handle sales through Jan. 1.
Washburn, who met his Oklahoman wife while attending Washington University in St. Louis and was introduced by her to Hideaway — “I immediately became a fan,” he remarked — said this week that he enjoyed creating the illustration for the restaurant.
“My big inspiration for the box, stylistically, was really digging back into some of the research about decorations that went up at the Stillwater location back in the day, and how it ended up with the Kahuna character, way back when,” Washburn said.
“I sort of took that 1950s and 1960s aesthetic and ran it through the filter of my work, which typically is humorous, wisecracking illustrations, and just worked with what came out.”
The artist said he’s excited that Hideaway intends to continue its Happy Hidewaways tradition in future years.
“That’s pretty exciting, especially for the arts community here,” he said. “Especially when it comes to Kahuna, I am excited to see what another artist will do with him next year.”
Eventually, he continued, Hideaway customers could end up with collections of art from Oklahoman artists.
“That’s really neat,” he said.