Bird Girl Launch with Duston Spear and Elizabeth Hess
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About
Join us to celebrate the publication of Duston Spear's new novel Bird Girl. Spear will be joined in conversation by Elizabeth Hess.
Set between present-day Western Massachusetts and the 1970s SoHo art scene, Bird Girl is a clear-eyed exploration of female visibility and erasure and the reclamation of a silenced voice through art.
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 turns her into a reluctant cause célèbre, 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 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.
Author Duston Spear is an exhibiting artist in New York 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. After decades exhibiting her work, Bird Girl is her debut novel.
Duston will be joined in conversation by Elizabeth Hess, a writer living in upstate New York. Hess covered art for the Village Voice for 15 years, gave dozens of lectures on the subject, and wrote numerous catalogue essays. Her articles have appeared in the Village Voice, New York magazine, the New York Observer, the London Telegraph, the Bark, Art in America, Art News, Artforum, and many other publications. Her books on animals include the bestselling biography Nim Chimpsky and Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter. Elizabeth and Duston first met through the Women's Action Coalition in SoHo in the 1990s.
After Hess and Spear's conversation, copies of Bird Girl will be available for sale and signing. This event is open to the public; we kindly request that you "buy" a free ticket in advance to give us a sense of attendance.