Her debut novel, about a reclusive painter dragged back into the SoHo art world by a viral podcast, gets a conversation with longtime Village Voice art critic Elizabeth Hess.
Saturday, August 22, 5:30–6:30pm | Chatham, NY | Free (RSVP requested)
The Chatham Bookstore hosts a launch event for Duston Spear's debut novel Bird Girl on August 22, with Spear in conversation with writer and longtime Village Voice art critic Elizabeth Hess.
The novel follows Rebekah Hunnicutt, a reclusive painter now living in Western Massachusetts who is unexpectedly thrust back into the spotlight when a popular podcast identifies her as the woman at the center of a decades-old SoHo art-world incident—in the 1970s, 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 celebre, drawing visitors to the once-secret studio where she's quietly reworked the same seven canvases for forty years, forcing her to decide whether to stay in the shadows or re-enter the New York art world on her own terms. The book takes on the power dynamics that shaped her youth and the way a woman's image can be celebrated as muse while her authorship as an artist gets erased.
Spear is an exhibiting artist based in New York with work in several museum collections, whose own practice has long engaged questions of authorship, visibility, and power through socially engaged and activist work. She spent over twenty years teaching art to incarcerated women in a maximum-security prison before moving to a small Massachusetts village; "Bird Girl" is her first novel after decades of exhibiting visual work.
Hess covered art for the Village Voice for fifteen years, lectured widely on the subject, and has written for New York magazine, the New York Observer, the London Telegraph, Art in America, ARTnews, and Artforum, among others. She's also the author of the bestselling biography Nim Chimpsky and Lost and Found: Dogs, Cats and Everyday Heroes at a Country Animal Shelter. She and Spear first met through the Women's Action Coalition in SoHo in the 1990s, which gives their conversation context well beyond this particular book.
Copies of "Bird Girl" will be available for sale and signing after the discussion. The event is free and open to the public; organizers ask attendees to reserve a free ticket in advance for a headcount.
Chatham Bookstore, 27 Main St., Chatham, NY. Free RSVP at eventbrite.com.
