Mother Pigeon

This is a portrait of Tina Trachtenburg, a street performance artist also known to her Instagram followers as “Mother Pigeon”. The daughter of Mexican parents living in San Antonio, Texas, Tina relocated to Brooklyn, New York in the 1980’s. After a career as a performative musician, she turned her creative energies to making soft sculptures of pigeons and rats and promoting animal rights of urban wildlife, which she believes are unfairly maligned and overlooked. Mother Pigeon erects installations of her soft sculptures in the public squares and subway stations of Manhattan. Dressed in her creative, hand-made clothing, she sits on the ground with her sculptures and feeds the real pigeons and other wildlife that greet her in search of food and attention. She supports her “Pigeon Religion” by selling the hand-made soft sculptures to New Yorkers and tourists who visit her installations.

Acrylic on panel
31.5 x 41.5
$7500