Swoon (artist)
Caledonia Dance Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is an American contemporary artist who works with printmaking, sculpture, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as one of the first women street artists to gain international recognition. Her work centers the transformative capacity of art as a catalyst for healing within communities experiencing crisis.
Early life and education
Caledonia Curry was born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. Both of her parents struggled with opioid addiction. At the age of 10, her mother enrolled her in art classes for retirees. Curry said, "the 80-year-old retired painters adopted me, they taught me how to paint. I’ve a focused, confident artist because of them."At nineteen, she moved to the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York, to study painting at the Pratt Institute, which she attended from 1998 to 2001. She received a classical Western education in both technique and career trajectory, which she viewed as too limited. She said “they’d tell me this is how you paint, these are the galleries that you will work with, and this is how your life is going to be.”
In 1999, searching to carve her own pathway and make her work more accessible to everyday people, she began pasting her paper portraits to the sides of buildings. At first, she pasted work anonymously. Later, she took the moniker Swoon, which appeared in a friend’s dream.
While at Pratt she joined activist groups and involved in feminist advocacy as a founding member of the TOYSHOP Collective, a women-run street theater group known for clandestine events in New York City.
Career and work
Street art
Swoon is widely known as one of the first women to achieve large-scale recognition as a street artist. She was part of a group of artists early 00s, including JR and Banksy, that were committed to pushing the forms and conceptual limits of the Street Art genre.Swoon has wheatpasted her intricate portraits on city streets around the world, including New York, Detroit, San Francisco, London, Bilbao, Hong Kong, Djerba, Cairo, Tokyo, and Jogjakarta.
She has been included in public art interventions including Santa’s Ghetto, a clandestine installation on the West Bank barrier wall in Bethlehem, organized by Banksy; Hecho en Oaxaca, and indoor and outdoor exhibition of Street Art organized by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Oaxaca; and Open Source a city-wide public art exhibition organized by Philadelphia Mural Arts, featuring the mural 5 Stories, created in tandem with arts therapy workshops with participants in the Mural Arts Restorative Justice Program. In 2006 she was featured in a DVD featuring visual artists from the contemporary art movement.
Her intricate wheatpaste portraits are created by carving wood or linoleum blocks, which are then printed by hand, or by cutting through several layers of paper at once. Her imagery is drawn from friends, family and other people she has met whose lives she wants to honor. She often elevates subjects who are unseen or overlooked within the urban landscape, or marginalized within the infrastructure of the city itself.
Her memorial portrait of Silvia Elena Morales, who was murdered in Juarez, Mexico, addressed the ongoing femicides that have claimed the lives of thousands of women in Mexico and Central America since 1993. In a visit to Juarez, Curry met with mothers who had lost their daughters, and with activists who were working to increase public awareness and to push for justice. The piece was installed in 2012 at Benito Juarez Plaza, the place where Sylvia Elena is thought to have disappeared, four years after it was created because of delays caused by escalating violence. Curry’s intention behind the memorial was “that we can see the face of Sylvia Elena, and recognize our connectedness with each of the thousands of women who have gone missing, with each of the family members who mourn the loss of their brightest light, and with a town in the shadow of the U.S. border, caught in a strangle hold of incomprehensible violence.”
Deitch Projects
In 2005, the Deitch Projects gallery held Swoon’s first New York solo exhibition: Swoon. The interior and the facade of the gallery was transformed into a cityscape populated by intricate cut out figures and block-prints set within sculptural elements referencing truss-work, power-lines and elevated trains. Drawing on Kowloon Walled City was the creative point of departure, Curry hoped to evoke the spontaneous, unregulated, and self built development that took place in the autonomous Hong Kong neighborhood before it was bulldozed in 1993.In 2008, Swoon returned to Deitch Projects for a two-part exhibition, Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. It included seven handmade boats that embarked from Troy, New York, staging public performances in the towns along the Hudson River. Swoon worked with Lisa D’Amour, Sxip Shirey, and Dark Dark Dark to create the performance that was set on the boats. The rafts arrived at Deitch Studios in Long Island City on September 7, 2008. The boats were tethered by ropes to the skirts of a twenty-five-foot-high paper sculpture of two sisters embracing, the central image of the indoor portion of the show. Deitch Studios was divided into two levels, above and below an imaginary flood line. Curry imagined that if the water of the East River were to rise, her boats could float into the shelter of the gallery space.
She was included in Art in the Streets, the first major museum survey of graffiti and street art, curated with Deitch, Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose.
In 2019, Curry had her third solo exhibition at Deitch Projects, Cicada. The show featured her first stop-motion animation. The short film uses mythological figures and allegory, including a “Tarantula Mother.”
Other exhibitions
In 2005 her work was featured in Greater New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and in 2006, she was included in Since 2000: Printmaking Now, a group exhibition showcasing prints from MoMA’s collection.Since 2005, Swoon has created over 20 solo exhibitions, most of which are immersive, site-specific installations, in museums and commercial galleries around the world. Her major exhibitions include ' at the Albright-Knox Foundation, at the Skissernas Museum, at Library Street Collective, ' at the Brooklyn Museum which was their first exhibition dedicated to a living street artist, at SNOW Contemporary, ' at The Institute of Contemporary Art: Boston, at Deitch Projects, Drown Your Boats at New Image Art Gallery, and at Deitch Projects.
She has also been included in significant group exhibitions including ' at The Parrish Museum of Art, a survey that argues that the work created on the water by contemporary artists is approaching the critical mass of the Land Art movement of the 1960s and 70s; and Catastrophe and the Power of Art at the Mori Art Museum, which considers the role art can play in recovery from major catastrophes that strike communities, as well as personal tragedies.
Swoon’s first museum retrospective, , opened on September 22, 2017, at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati. The exhibition showcased multiple dimensions of Curry’s practice, including the new site-specific installation Medea, that visually centers around the portrait of a home that is splitting apart, re-stagings of past landmark projects, and a survey of her socially-driven work in Braddock, Pennsylvania and Cormiers, Haiti.
Art as activism
Swoon’s site-specific exhibitions are in close dialogue with her activism and advocacy efforts, which explore the power of art to respond to crises caused by natural disasters, structural violence, and addiction. In 2015, she began working with Philadelphia Mural Arts on the multi-platform project 5 Stories. The project drew from her experience growing up in an opioid addicted family. Participants worked with Curry, therapist and yoga instructor Jessica Radovich, and storytelling coach Heather Box of the Million Person Project in a month-long art therapy and personal storytelling course that took place inside Graterford State Correctional Institution, at the Interim House treatment center, and with Philadelphia Mural Arts Guild, a prison-to-community reentry program. The classes addressed the relationship between trauma, loss, addiction and mass incarceration. In addition to this community engagement, Curry created several portraits of those who have participated in the project, which were incorporated into a public mural at 3060 West Jefferson St in North Philadelphia.Curry returned to Philadelphia in 2018 to continue her harm-reduction advocacy with Philadelphia Mural Arts, Jessica Radovich, Heather Box, and Julian Mocine-Mcqueen. Curry cites Dr. Gabor Mate, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, as someone who changed her perspective by helping her understand that addictions are a desperate attempt to soothe unmanageable pain.
The Road Home hosted daily drop-in workshops at the Kensington Storefront, located across the street from Prevention Point, a center that provides services to people experiencing homelessness and addiction. The project culminated in a public conference at the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. Gabor Mate as the keynote speaker, a private workshop with members of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services, and a public mural, Healing Begins with Connection, across the street from Prevention Point in Kensington.
Collaborative projects
Music Box
The Music Box was the first iteration of Music Box Village, an immersive, experimental, fully playable musical environment in New Orleans founded by Swoon and artist-led organization New Orleans Airlift. In 2010, Swoon, with co-founding artists Taylor Lee Shepherd and Delaney Martin, developed the concept of musical architecture. In 2011, they invited 25 artists to create a site-specific installation of musical houses as an initial prototype for what musical architecture could look and sound like. This original installation was built out of salvaged materials from a collapsed Creole Cottage. The project began five years after Hurricane Katrina, in response to the long-term recovery of the city that continued to impact the livelihood of residents and the local musical culture. Curry’s intention was to cultivate a space for collective play to support the process of healing from disaster. She says "I hope it represents this very basic need in people while rebuilding to rebuild joyfully and with imagination."On October 22, 2011, The Music Box hosted its debut performance playing the musical houses. Over the 9-month initial run, the Music Box received local and national attention. The project served over 15,000 guests and hosted over 70 New Orleans–based and international musicians.
After the initial run on Piety Street, the project created short-term performance installations in New Orleans City Park, Kyiv, Shreveport, Louisiana, Atlanta and Tampa, Florida. In 2016, the project was renamed Music Box Village and successfully raised funds to support a permanent location in New Orleans. Music Box Village ran a calendar of regular daytime and night-time performances. Music Box Village is the flagship project of New Orleans Airlift, a non-profit organization who foster opportunities through arts education and the creation of experimental public artworks.