Overview

Rebekah Hunnicutt, a reclusive painter now living in Western Massachusetts is unexpectedly thrust into the art-world spotlight when a popular podcast identifies her as the young woman behind a decades-old art-world incident. In the 1970s, at the height of the Soho art scene, she was entangled with an ambitious artist who used her four-foot-long braid as material for his work. The podcast's retelling of that episode turns her into a reluctant cause célébre, drawing curious visitors to the once-secret studio where she has quietly reworked the same seven canvases for forty years. Now she must decide whether to remain in the shadows or finally re-enter the New York art world, armed with the artwork that has consumed her life. What unfolds lays bare the artistic power dynamics that shaped her youth and the ways a woman's image can be celebrated as muse only to be erased as an artist. Rebekah's journey between past and present illuminates the long personal consequences of that youthful artistic transaction and the cost of a single act of creation that wasn't entirely her own. Bird Girl is a clear-eyed exploration of female visibility and erasure and the reclamation of a silenced voice through art.

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9781685137762

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Reviews

""In her debut novel, Duston Spear brilliantly captures the ambiance and culture of Soho in its artistic prime, evoking the gender gaps and preening personalities in ways that are both insightful and funny."" -Porter Aichele, author of Modern Art on Display: The Legacies of Six Collectors ""Bird Girl is an often touching and often incisive critique of the 1970s downtown art scene. As a Soho dweller for decades, I enjoyed the veiled references to artists, critics, and galleries and as a feminist activist I identified wholeheartedly with the protagonist, a young woman artist ill prepared for the hierarchal vicissitudes of the commercial art world who finally trades her victim status with her victimizer. Not a pretty picture, but Duston Spear was there then and knows the dirt."" -Lucy R, Lippard, author of Moving Targets ""What price toxic apprenticeship? That's one question Duston Spear's novel Bird Girl explores from brilliant origin to entangled end."" -Lisa Williams, author of The Hammered Dulcimer ""Bird Girl's eagle-eyed storyteller swoops below the surface of the Soho art scene of the 1970s. Her ladylike talons find purchase in a sexist world that is, by turns, hilarious, sexual, poignant, and cruel. The tale she spins shifts back and forth in time, enriched by thinly veiled portraits and her superb descriptive powers."" -Judith E. Stein, author of Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art

Author Information

Duston Spear is an exhibiting artist in NY with work in several museums' collections. Her work has long engaged questions of authorship, visibility, and power through socially engaged and activist practices. She worked with incarcerated women, teaching art, in a maximum-security prison for over twenty years before moving to a small village in Massachusetts. She recently moved into a 1840s house with a livery barn for her studio and office and goats in the backyard. After decades exhibiting her work, Bird Girl is her debut novel.

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