Swoon

Caledonia Curry (born 1977), 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.

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 [become] a focused, confident artist because of them."

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.

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.

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.

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.

She has been included in public art interventions including Santa’s Ghetto (2007), a clandestine installation on the West Bank barrier wall in Bethlehem, organized by Banksy; Hecho en Oaxaca (2013), and indoor and outdoor exhibition of Street Art organized by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Oaxaca; and Open Source (2015) 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.

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 (2008), 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.

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 (playwright), Sxip Shirey (circus composer), and Dark Dark Dark (original music) 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 (2011), the first major museum survey of graffiti and street art, curated with Deitch, Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose.

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.

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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.”