SWOON
(American, b. 1977)
Originally known for her street art, Swoon (born Caledonia Dance Curry) is a mixed media artist who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of human figures. Curry was born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York when she was nineteen to study painting at the Pratt Institute, receiving a BA in fine arts in 2002. Then, Curry joined groups in New York City like Grub, which provides free Dumpster-dived dinners in Brooklyn. She also founded the Toyshop collective, known for organizing events such as a march through the Lower East Side consisting of 50 people playing instruments made out of junk. She started to gain recognition for her street art around 1999 and large-scale installations soon thereafter; in 2005, she was the subject of an eponymous solo exhibition mounted by now-mentor Jeffrey Deitch. Swoon has since been featured in major museums including a 2014 solo show, Submerged Motherlands, at the Brooklyn Museum.
Swoon, in her own words:
Working under the artist name Swoon I have spent the last 13 years in an ongoing exploration of the relationship of people to their built environment.
I began my work as a classically trained visual artist and printmaker, and have an ongoing project of wheat pasting portraits to the walls of cities around the world. This initial impetus to create interventions in the urban landscape has continued to unfold in a variety of ways.
From 2006-2009 I constructed and navigated flotillas of rafts made from recycled materials down the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, and across the Adriatic Sea to Venice.
Since 2008 I have been working independently and in collaboration with the collective Transformazium on community based projects in the town of Braddock, Pennsylvania.
In 2010 and 2011 with the group Konbit Shelter, I constructed first a community center and then a home in earthquake devastated Haiti, bringing the creative process into the reconstruction effort.
I am currently working toward the construction of a musical house, entitled Dithyrambalina in New Orleans with New Orleans Airlift.
Alongside my community based practices, I have a studio and installation based practice of drawing, printmaking, and the construction of architectural installations and sculptures.