Overview

This unique and richly-illustrated volume focuses on an electrifying body of work by American painter Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, whose raw, emotionally-charged works navigate identity, politics, faith, and the complexities of American life. With an unflinching eye and a painterly sensibility rooted in both the classical and the contemporary, Dupuy-Spencer captures moments of transcendence, confusion, and contradiction rendered in arresting compositions that feel at once mythic and deeply personal. This book brings together 75 paintings, including new and never-published artworks, offering a comprehensive look at an artist whose visual language speaks powerfully to the current moment. Accompanying texts are penned by acclaimed writer Nina MacLaughlin, whose perceptive and lyrical prose deepens the reader s encounter with Dupuy-Spencer s art. Equal parts visual archive and literary meditation, this book is an invitation to enter a world as beautiful as it is uncompromising.

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9781580937269

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Author Information

Celeste Dupuy Spencer (1979–2026) was a Los Angeles–based American painter known for expressive, layered figurative works that interrogate power, religion, privilege, and community. A Bard alumna, her work—featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. and major collections—blends intimacy and existential urgency. Nina MacLaughlin is the award-winning author of Wake Siren: Ovid Resung, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter, a finalist for the New England Book Award; as well as Summer Solstice and the bestselling Winter Solstice, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and then as a books columnist for the Boston Globe, and her column on New England Literary News continues in newsletter form. Her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, AGNI, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times Book Review, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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