"Exploring the still life has felt generative and surprising. I moved through a variety of approaches to the image, some are painted with a camera obscura, with an intervening photograph, from life or some combination of techniques. They all have different historical references in the handling of the paint, which seems like an effort to move toward freedom. By accident it also happened that the work spanned a particular passage in my life, there has been a reckoning with mortality underway, it was a strange summer."
—— Rebecca Bird
Rebecca Bird’s quietly unsettling works use the vocabulary of traditional painting to situate the current moment in a historical timeline. She paints intimate domestic scenes as microcosms to examine subjectivity and relationships between self, humanity and nature. For Bird, the studio is a lens that condenses a wide range of research and experience into a single focal point.
Her major public works include “Intent & Assembly” a monumental site-specific painting celebrating immunotherapy research for the lobby of Seattle Children’s Research Institute and “Cycle” a hand painted video project about water, permanently installed at Seattle Tacoma International Airport, scheduled to open in Spring of 2026.
Bird’s works are held in private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a 2023 Gottlieb Individual Support Grant. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, Artforum.com and the New York Times.
Rebecca Bird received her BFA from the Cooper Union in having attended the Yale Summer School. She was a Fulbright Fellow to Japan researching Nihonga (traditional Japanese painting). She has worked as an archeological illustrator for the Metropolitan Museum on site in Dashur, Egypt. Originally from Seattle, Bird lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
