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Many thanks are due to our faithful community. Their tweets helped us get in touch with @TrueBloodHBO, the official True Blood twitter feed and they set up a coast-to-coast conference call Tuesday evening between Suzuki Ingerslev, Production Designer for the show, Shelley (who has seen every episode), and me (who has read the books and will now go out and rent Season 1).

Getting to ask Suzuki our questions directly was incredibly exciting and the answers we got were pretty thrilling too! How cool is this…

How True Blood found the “Bird Lady”

The script for Episode 1 of Season 2 called for “a primitive piece of art; like a dancing girl” to be placed on the character Maryann’s coffee table. Suzuki and Cat Smith, Art Director, went to Google to look for images that fit these requirements, hoping to find something that inspired them. They looked at many different types of ancient images including Mycenaean, Etruscan, and Minoan examples. Entering search terms something like “Egyptian female statues,” they came across our very own “Bird Lady.” They printed out a selection of appropriate images and presented them to Alan Ball, the show’s creator.

He was immediately drawn to the “Bird Lady,” seeing something so elegant, beautiful and perfect in her form that she became the obvious choice. As Suzuki pointed out, though she is not the first to do so, this ancient figure looks both modern and primitive at the same time. In terms of the show, she said using it helped to emphasize that Maryann’s character is timeless.

We also found it interesting that Suzuki said they looked at a lot of Egyptian images and chose this one precisely because it is not a “typical” ancient Egyptian representation. This was precisely the thinking behind curator James F. Romano’s choice of the “Bird Lady” as the signature image for the reinstalled Egyptian galleries, which opened in April 2003. As usual, he wanted to get people to stop, look and think twice.

How True Blood created their “Bird Lady”

As part of Alan Ball’s vision for the show, which involves going the distance to add a level of authenticity, an artist was hired to make a version of the “Bird Lady” based on renderings off the web. Cindy Jackson made three statues in case one got broken during filming. Suzuki wanted a base that let the figure float and emphasized its sense of movement. So the artist drilled a rod into the bottom of the statue that connects to a flat base. We explained that we obviously couldn’t do that to a 5,500 year old object but we do have a special mount that safely produces the same floating effect.

HBO’s version of “Bird Lady” made for the series True Blood by artist Cindy Jackson from a mold she created and casting plaster.  Images courtesy Suzuki Ingerslev. 

Lastly, a few final bits of “Bird Lady” and True Blood trivia.

One of the characters refers to the statue as “Mycenean or something.” Maryann intentionally raises her arms in the same pose during the episode; this gesture was directly inspired by the choice of the “Bird Lady” for the statue. And yes, the “Bird Lady” can be read as a clue to Maryann’s eternal nature, but no, there is not necessarily any further connection.

Many thanks to HBO’s True Blood team for responding so quickly and warmly to our questions. We are glad you love the “Bird Lady” as much as we do.

We were first notified of this surprise appearance from a comment in our online collection by Marlene F. Emmett, who spotted a statue that sure looks like our “Bird Lady” in the first episode of the second season of the HBO series True Blood. When I heard about it from Shelley via e-mail, I began to search the web and found an art history shout-out to us at this blog.

Great eye, ladies, and thanks for letting us know about it! Shelley meanwhile got some screenshots to me so I could study them:

Sam Trammell with “Bird Lady” in the second season premiere of the HBO series True Blood.

Of course, this is not our actual “Bird Lady,” but the prop in the pictures is clearly based on our most complete examples, like the one on our website. I know this because we included two fragmentary “Bird Lady figurines” in our recently closed exhibition, The Fertile Goddess and I did a lot of research on Predynastic female figurines from Egypt in order to write the labels.

Close-up of “Bird Lady” from True Blood.

Like the figure used in True Blood, the Brooklyn Museum figurines have white paint on their lower halves, representing a skirt, and their legs are not indicated. They were all excavated from graves at one site in Egypt in the early twentieth century. Other Predynastic figurines with raised arms and beak-like faces exist but they don’t have the skirt and their legs are indicated.  For an example of this type see this figure at the British Museum.

I would love to know how True Blood got the idea for this prop! Did someone from the show come to Brooklyn and see ours? Did they see it online or in a book? It is certainly an iconic and much reproduced image but not necessarily one I’d expect to turn up in a television show.

I am also very curious about where they found the replica that is used in the show. I did find a few websites that sell replicas based on our “Bird Lady” (here, here and here) and even a photo of one of these replicas on Flickr. However, these have very different bases from the one on True Blood. Maybe they had a different base made or even commissioned an artist to make a replica. I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who might know the answers to these questions.