By Kevin Nance
Contributing Writer
Images Provided by John Hockensmith

As a sophomore art major at Transylvania University in 2004, Spencer Reinhard of Lexington made the biggest mistake of his life. He and three students from the University of Kentucky planned and executed an attempt to steal four rare folios of John James Audubon’s legendary magnum opus, “The Birds of America” (1838). A similar set had recently sold for $12 million, which, as Reinhard later told Vanity Fair, “sparked my imagination, like a fantasy.” The crime was international news, a sensation later dramatized in the 2018 film “American Animals.”

The brazen theft attempt — during which one of the UK students, Warren Lipka, used a Taser-like weapon to subdue and handcuff Transy’s special collections librarian and university archivist, Betty Jean “BJ” Gooch — was largely botched. The Audubon folios never made it out of the building, but two backpacks — full of about $750,000 worth of other rare books and manuscripts — did. After the robbers tried to have some of those materials appraised at Christie’s in New York, they were caught, arrested and sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison. Before his release in 2012, Reinhard spent those years at low-security prisons in Ashland, Ky., and Fort Dix, N.J., doing what he’d planned to do at Transy: learning how to be a visual artist. 

Twenty years later, Reinhard, now 40, is back in the public eye — once again linked, for good and/or ill, to Audubon. “Uplifted Imagination: Avian Artistry,” the current show at Hockensmith’s Fine Art Editions Gallery in Lexington, features a series of Reinhard’s bird-centered mixed-media pieces that combine his acrylic versions of some of Audubon’s most famous images from “The Birds of America” with an overlay of texts and pictures from magazines, using a unique ink transfer technique that he developed in prison. 

The results are accomplished and remarkably beautiful, striking up a fruitful conversation between Audubon’s naturalistic work and an ephemeral contemporary collage method of Reinhard’s own devising. That conversation, which began when he first laid eyes on Audubon’s work during a tour of the Transy library all those years ago, has moments of wonder and whimsy, such as when a tiny Mr. Peanut shows up in a bird’s beak. Elsewhere, disembodied texts, sometimes reconfigured or reversed, seem to whisper about the strange, shared history of these two flawed men. (Although still considered one of the finest wildlife artists ever, Audubon, recent scholars have shown, was also a white supremacist and anti-abolitionist who enslaved many people of color during his lifetime. He was also a plagiarist and fabulist, often lying about his life and work and publishing fraudulent data.) “These layered surfaces, at once delicate and dense, evoke the tension between visibility and erasure, fragility and strength,” Reinhard says in an artist’s statement. “In this context, the birds become potent symbols of freedom, survival and the enduring human spirit — reminders of what persists, even in captivity.” 

Two decades on, the conversation continues.

“The passion that drove Spencer 20 years ago to be so stupid — to have such poor discretion, let’s say — is still driving him to honor the legacy of Audubon and bring it into the future,” gallery owner John Hockensmith says. “With these acrylic paintings and his ink transfer technique, Spencer has taken an old art form and created a new one.”

Undermain recently caught up with Reinhard for a video interview from Cali, Colombia, where he now lives with his wife and their two children. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Kevin Nance: What was your mindset all those years ago when you conceived the crime at Transylvania? “American Animals” suggests that you and your colleagues lacked purpose in your lives, that you needed something like this art heist to provide that. Was that accurate, or just the Hollywood version?

Spencer Reinhard: That was the Hollywood version, but it’s true that I wasn’t feeling inspired or motivated by where my life was going. I just felt like I was going through the motions, and there wasn’t any incentive for me to change that course because I was in the university, I was doing what I was supposed to do, I was basically on the right path. But there was a sense of malaise, a sense that this was just a continuation of high school, that I wasn’t learning for the sake of bettering myself or becoming somebody. And I think that energy kind of transferred itself to this crime, or at least the planning of it, which there was never any expectation that it was going to happen, for real. I do remember having this arrogance about myself at the time — that I was going to be this great artist, that whatever happened, I would be able to get out of it. I even thought that if I go to prison, I’d still be an artist.

KN: And that’s what happened. 

SR: Yes, essentially. But so many other things could have happened where I wouldn’t be sitting here talking about how well things worked out. And it’s something I can say I never lost sight of, even after I got arrested and was in jail. I never lost sight of this belief that I wanted to be an artist, that I was an artist, and that if I worked hard enough, I could overcome any obstacle.

KN: You made the most of your time in prison, it seems.

SR: Fortunately, I was in a low-security prison where they had what’s called hobby craft. You can get art supplies and spend a few hours a day in the art building, working. Somebody had given me a quart of gel medium, which I never would have used because my professor [at Transy] didn’t like anything glossy on a canvas. It was free material, though, and I was using it, mixing it with paint, collage, all kinds of stuff. And it was through this experimentation with mixed media that I happened to stick a piece of a magazine down, and when I peeled it off, the ink had stuck to the gel medium and was floating transparently on the surface. It was that one instance that captured my imagination and spurred my creative drive. I started experimenting with that technique over and over again, and doing larger pieces, pushing the technique. By 2008, the process had completely changed. I could now do whole pieces of paper with very little bubbling. And it continued to evolve as I took on more ambitious projects.

KN: You got out of prison in 2012. What happened then? 

SR: I’d always been a nature lover, an outdoorsy type, and when I got out, I got some books and learned what birds could be seen in the area around Lexington. I started to meet other birders, and eventually got connected with some of the local birding groups. That connected me to the local community again in a positive way, which I found very difficult to do otherwise. The birding community welcomed me into their group, and I didn’t think they had any idea about my past. Turns out I was pretty good at spotting birds. A lot of people in birding groups are older, so having younger people there to help spot is always a bonus. After a couple of years, I started to see the potential to include birds in my work. And when I did my first bird piece, I decided to do Audubon’s Louisiana Heron. That was my jump-off point. 

KN: As a sort of tribute to Audubon?

SR: Yes, and to see if I could recreate his style in acrylic, and to see how he handled things like feathers and other details. 

KN: How did you decide to put the bird paintings together with this contemporary overlay that we see in the show?

SR: I realized that the ink transfer technique I’d developed in prison was my most accomplished style. So, I decided to combine that with my bird paintings in acrylic. It just seemed like a good meeting point, to use the Audubon birds as the foundation of the paintings and then reworking them, making them my own with the transfer technique.

KN: Are all your birds in the show derived from Audubon?

SR: They’re all basically copies of his original pieces, although sometimes I just reference them, using a different bird with a similar pose.

KN: The irony of that is that it puts you back together with Audubon. Given the crime for which you were imprisoned, you must realize that anybody who knows the story is going to connect the dots.

SR: Yes, and that certainly has played a role in my interest in Audubon years later as an artist. It’s also reconnecting with that part of my past and showing a positive side of it — what has come from that over the past 20 years.

KN: You aren’t worried that people might think you’re continuing to exploit Audubon’s work, or that the show is just going to revive the memory of what you did?

SR: It’s a bit of a challenge, isn't it? It’s connecting to something that should be a moment in my life that I would want to forget and not have brought up, to let it disappear into the past. But I also think that without the mistake I made when I was 20 years old, I wouldn’t be capable of creating this series. Certainly, I wouldn’t have pursued this ink transfer technique for seven years. I hope people will look at the series and see it as a tribute to Audubon’s work and a reflection of what I’ve made of my life since then, a big part of which has been developing my artistic practice and becoming a professional artist.