Artist interrupted
duston spear
October 2 - October 30, 2026
On view at Red Giant, Artist Interrupted presents a mixed media installation of new work by Duston Spear. Works in the installation are made through the perspective of the protagonist of Spear’s novel, Bird Girl, published in August through independent press Black Rose Writing.
The Baltimore launch of Bird Girl coincides with Artist Interrupted, a site-specific mixed media installation at Red Giant Gallery. Duston Spear will be in conversation with Baltimore artist and Red Giant Gallery director Mary Gagler, discussing the intersections of visual art and fiction, the experiences of women artists across generations, and the ways an artist's studio practice can inform a novel. Together, the exhibition and conversation offer two perspectives on shared themes of authorship, memory, visibility, and artistic legacy.
Presented in partnership with Red Giant Gallery, the event invites audiences to experience both the conversation at Charm City Books and Artist Interrupted, where Spear's visual art extends the novel's exploration of artistic authorship and the visibility of women artists.
About the novel: Bird Girl
When a hit podcast resurrects the story of a notorious artist from New York's Soho scene of the 1970s, public fascination shifts from the charismatic man who made headlines to the woman who quietly disappeared from view. Hidden away in western Massachusetts, painter Rebekah Hunnicutt has spent four decades creating seven monumental canvases that challenge everything the art world thought it knew.
Moving between the charged atmosphere of downtown New York and the present day, Bird Girl explores ambition, friendship, betrayal, and the long arc of artistic recognition. At once an art-world novel and a story about reclaiming authorship, it asks who gets remembered, who gets erased, and who ultimately tells the story.
Artist Bio
Duston Spear is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited nationally for more than four decades. Born in Richmond, Virginia, she moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design, living in Soho for the next thirty years during the neighborhood's transformative decades. Her work has received awards from Creative Time and Art Matters, with projects supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her artwork is represented in museum and university collections, and for more than twenty years she served as an adjunct faculty member in Marymount Manhattan College's college program inside a maximum-security prison, where she taught art and writing.
Bird Girl is her debut novel, set between the downtown New York art world of the 1970s and the present day. Informed by Spear's years in Soho, it explores artistic authorship, the overlooked contributions of women artists, and the complicated relationship between art and power.
