Duston Spear discusses her debut novel Bird Girl in conversation with art historian and critic Judith E. Stein. Set between present-day Western Massachusetts and the 1970s Soho art world, Bird Girl explores authorship, visibility, and the long afterlife of a formative artistic act. When a viral podcast reframes a decades-old incident involving a young artist and her lover, a reclusive painter is thrust into public view and must decide whether to reclaim her narrative.

Rebekah Hunnicutt, a reclusive painter living in Western Massachusetts, has spent decades creating a secret body of work—seven monumental canvases inscribed by hand with the full text of Moby-Dick. When a popular podcast, Trichophilia on Trial, revisits a formative episode from her youth in the 1970s Soho art world—when she was persuaded to cut off her waist-length braid for her boyfriend’s artwork—Rebekah is thrust into an unwanted spotlight.

As the podcast reframes the past and elevates the man’s career, Rebekah must confront the question of authorship—of her work, her body, and her story. Bird Girl is a portrait of an artist interrupted, and a meditation on how myth can eclipse a woman’s creative life. 

Duston Spear is a visual artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely, including a mid-career retrospective at the Weatherspoon Art Museum. She has artwork in the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum, and has been included in the collections of the High Museum of Art and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Spear is a recipient of awards and grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, Art Matters, and Creative Time. Materials from her 3 Women in Black project, including costumes and artists’ books, are held in the Special Collections and University Archives at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She taught for over two decades in the College Program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility and has contributed to Transforming Together: Higher Education and the Carceral State (Routledge, 2024). Her interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of text and image, authorship, and the politics of visibility.

Bird Girl is her debut novel. 

Dr. Judith E. Stein, a writer and curator specializing in modern and contemporary art, is the author of Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art. Her exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts include I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin and Red Grooms: A Retrospective. Her catalogue essays include “Object Lessons: Women’s Bodybuilding and Performance Art 1970’s-80’s,” and “‘The White-Haired Girl,’ A Feminist Reading of Grandma Moses.” A contributor to Hyperallergic and Art in America, Stein is a past president of the American Section of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics.