Duston Spear: Author’s Page
© Jon-Marc Seimon, 2026
Duston Spear is a visual artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely, including a mid-career retrospective, Battledress, 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.
Her debut novel, Bird Girl (2026), draws on the 1970s Soho art world and the long afterlife of artistic myth. She lives in Western Massachusetts, where she is working on a second novel, The Stayers, a speculative project rooted in the 1874 Mill River Flood that extends into a body of paintings and archival works.
“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. ”
Synopsis:
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.
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Release date: August 6, 2026
Formats: Book-Kindle-Audible
Also available at bookshop.org
BOOK TOUR
SEPTEMBER 2026
Wednesday September 9 at 7:00 pm
Bedford Playhouse, Bedford New York
Bird Girl with Duston Spear in Conversation with Judith E. Stein – Bedford Playhouse
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Wednesday September 16 at 7:00
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Broadside Books (Western Massachusetts LAUNCH)
247 Main Street
Northampton, MA.
In conversation with writer/musician Nerissa Nields
https://broadsidebooks.com/events/calendar/2026/09
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Tuesday September 29
Reading and Art Installation Reception
Athol Public Library
568 Main Street
Athol, MA.
Book launch and art show reception for Bird Girl | Athol Public Library
Time: 5:30-6:30
Bird Girl will be available at Unnameable Books
66 Avenue A
Turner’s Falls
OCTOBER
Sunday October 4
Time: 2:00
Scuppernong Books, Greensboro, North Carolina
In conversation with K. Porter Aichele
https://scuppernongbooks.com/events/calendar/2026/10
New Dominion Bookshop
Saturday October 10
Time: 4:00
https://ndbookshop.com
Mary’s gallery (Baltimore)
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Times and art to be filled in
Saturday October 16
Art installation and reading, Storyboarding my Life
Bio
Duston Spear is a visual artist and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely, including a mid-career retrospective, Battledress, 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.
For more than twenty years, she taught writing in the college program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
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.
Her debut novel, Bird Girl (2026), draws on the 1970s Soho art world and the long afterlife of artistic myth. She lives in Western Massachusetts, where she is working on a second novel, The Stayers, a speculative project rooted in the 1874 Mill River Flood that extends into a body of paintings and archival works.
Contact:
Duston Spear
PO Box 184 Montague, MA. 01351
https://www.duston.spear.name
Dustonspear. substack.com