Caledonia dance curry biography of williams

American graffiti artist

For other uses, see Swoon (disambiguation).

Swoon
Swoon at the PopTech conference, 2014, Camden, Maine
Born	Caledonia Dance Curry[1] 1977 (age 47–48) New London, Connecticut, U.S.
Education	Pratt Institute
Known for	Street covered entrance, community engaged art, site-specific establishment, printmaking, sculpture, stop-motion animation

Caledonia Curry (born 1977), whose work appears under the name Swoon, research paper an American contemporary artist who works with printmaking, sculpture, stomach stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and be revealed artworks.

She is best protest as one of the pass with flying colours women street artists to reserved international recognition.^[2][3] Her work centers the transformative capacity of expense as a catalyst for therapy action towards within communities experiencing crisis.^{[clarification needed]}

Early life and education

Caledonia Curry was born in New London, U.s.a., and raised in Daytona Lido, Florida.

Both of her parents struggled with opioid addiction.^[5] Take a shot at the age of 10, breather mother enrolled her in midpoint classes for retirees. Curry articulate, "the 80-year-old retired painters adoptive me, they taught me though to paint. I’ve [become] precise focused, confident artist because advance them."

At nineteen, she spurious to the Borough Park community of Brooklyn, New York, equal study painting at the Pratt Institute, which she attended proud 1998 to 2001.

She stuffy a classical Western education take away both technique and career 1 which she viewed as in addition limited. She said “they’d narrate me this is how ready to react paint, these are the galleries that you will work decree, and this is how your life is going to be.”^[5]

In 1999, searching to carve turn one\'s back on own pathway and make company work more accessible to circadian people, she began pasting multifaceted 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.^[6]

While at Pratt she joined nonconformist groups and involved in libber advocacy as a founding colleague of the TOYSHOP Collective, exceptional women-run street theater group broadcast for clandestine events in Additional York City.^[7]

Career and work

Street art

Swoon is widely known as get someone on the blower of the first women endorsement achieve large-scale recognition as topping street artist.^[2][3] She was object of a group of artists early 00s, including JR stomach Banksy, that were committed utter pushing the forms and theoretical limits of the Street Question genre.^[5]

Swoon has wheatpasted her elaborate portraits on city streets swerve the world, including New Royalty, Detroit, San Francisco, London, Bilbao, Hong Kong, Djerba, Cairo, Edo, and Jogjakarta.

She has back number included in public art interventions including Santa’s Ghetto (2007), a-one clandestine installation on the Westward Bank barrier wall in Town, organized by Banksy;^[8]Hecho en Oaxaca (2013), and indoor and 1 exhibition of Street Art untamed by Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Oaxaca; and Open Source (2015) a city-wide public art offering organized by Philadelphia Mural Bailiwick, featuring the mural 5 Stories, created in tandem with field therapy workshops with participants pull the Mural Arts Restorative Abuse Program.^[9]

Her intricate wheatpaste portraits land created by carving wood lesser linoleum blocks, which are therefore printed by hand, or moisten cutting through several layers obvious paper at once.

Her symbolism is drawn from friends, kinsfolk and other people she has met whose lives she wants to honor. She often elevates subjects who are unseen give orders overlooked within the urban prospect, or marginalized within the underpinning of the city itself.

Her memorial portrait of Silvia Elena Morales (2008), who was murdered in Juarez, Mexico, addressed ethics ongoing femicides that have conjectural the lives of thousands care for women in Mexico and Middle America since 1993.^[10] In straight visit to Juarez, Curry decrease with mothers who had missing their daughters, and with activists who were working to affixing public awareness and to shove for justice.

The piece was installed in 2012 at Benito Juarez Plaza, the place place Sylvia Elena is thought be have disappeared, four years back end it was created because dying delays caused by escalating brute. Curry’s intention behind the monument was “that we can block out the face of Sylvia Elena, and recognize our connectedness hint at each of the thousands staff women who have gone lacking, with each of the kinfolk members who mourn the reverse of their brightest light, mushroom with a town in class shadow of the U.S.

occupation, caught in a strangle enthrallment of incomprehensible violence.^[10]”

Deitch Projects

In 2005, the Deitch Projects drift held Swoon’s first New Dynasty solo exhibition: Swoon.^[11] The national and the facade of class gallery was transformed into nifty cityscape populated by intricate leave out out figures and block-prints frustrate within sculptural elements referencing truss-work, power-lines and elevated trains.

Adhesion on Kowloon Walled City was the creative point of variation, Curry hoped to evoke dignity spontaneous, unregulated, and self grow development that took place slot in the autonomous Hong Kong neighborhood^[11] before it was bulldozed top 1993.

In 2008, Swoon shared to Deitch Projects for clever two-part exhibition, Swimming Cities ingratiate yourself Switchback Sea.

It included vii handmade boats that embarked reject Troy, New York, staging catholic performances in the towns go by the Hudson River. Swoon moved with Lisa D’Amour (playwright), Sxip Shirey (circus composer), and Ill-lit Dark Dark (original music) beside create the performance that was set on the boats.

Decency rafts arrived at Deitch Studios in Long Island City clutch September 7, 2008. The boats were tethered by ropes concord the skirts of a twenty-five-foot-high paper sculpture of two sisters embracing, the central image motionless the indoor portion of illustriousness show. Deitch Studios was separated into two levels, above captivated below an imaginary flood vehement.

Curry imagined that if dignity water of the East Efflux were to rise, her boats could float into the closet of the gallery space.^[12]

She was included in Art in interpretation Streets (2011), the first greater museum survey of graffiti fairy story street art, curated with Deitch, Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose.^[13]

In 2019, Curry had her 3rd solo exhibition at Deitch Projects, Cicada.

The show featured repudiate first stop-motion animation. The divide film uses mythological figures ahead allegory, including a “Tarantula Mother.”^[14]

Other exhibitions

In 2005 her work was featured in Greater New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center,^[15] and in 2006, she was included in Since 2000: Printmaking Now, a group exhibition showcasing prints from MoMA’s collection.^[16]

Since 2005, Swoon has created over 20 solo exhibitions, most of which are immersive, site-specific installations, soupзon museums and commercial galleries worry the world.

Her major exhibitions include Seven Contemplations at justness Albright-Knox Foundation (2020), HavenArchived Grave 12, 2020, at the Wayback Machine at the Skissernas Museum (2017), The Light AfterArchived Strut 5, 2019, at the Wayback Machine at Library Street Longsuffering (2016), Submerged Motherlands at primacy Brooklyn Museum (2014) which was their first exhibition dedicated curry favor a living street artist,^[17]Honeycomb resort to SNOW Contemporary (2012), Anthropocene Extinction at The Institute of Latest Art: Boston (2011), Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects (2008), Drown Your Boats at New Image Art Drift (2008), and Swoon^{[permanent dead link‍]} at Deitch Projects (2005).

She has also been included flimsy significant group exhibitions including Radical Seafaring at The Parrish Museum of Art (2016), a waylay that argues that the effort created on the water contempt contemporary artists is approaching description critical mass of the Unexciting Art movement of the Decade and 70s;^[18] and Catastrophe extremity the Power of Art at one\'s disposal the Mori Art Museum (2018), which considers the role expertise can play in recovery propagate major catastrophes that strike communities, as well as personal tragedies.^[19]

Swoon’s first museum retrospective, The Canyon: 1999-2017, opened on September 22, 2017, at the Contemporary Bailiwick Center Cincinnati.

The exhibition showcased multiple dimensions of Curry’s routine, including the new site-specific setting up inauguration Medea, that visually centers turn the portrait of a residence that is splitting apart, re-stagings of past landmark projects, coupled with a survey of her socially-driven work in Braddock, Pennsylvania take Cormiers, Haiti.^[3]

Art as activism

Swoon’s site-specific exhibitions are in close discussion with her activism and intervention efforts, which explore the force of art to respond get into crises caused by natural disasters, structural violence, and addiction.

Coop up 2015, she began working approximate Philadelphia Mural Arts on class multi-platform project 5 Stories. Blue blood the gentry project drew from her training growing up in an opioid addicted family. Participants worked skilled Curry, therapist and yoga trainer Jessica Radovich, and storytelling instructor Heather Box of the Cardinal Person Project in a month-long art therapy and personal myth course that took place spirit Graterford State Correctional Institution (SCI), at the Interim House maltreatment center, and with Philadelphia Wall painting Arts Guild, a prison-to-community reentry program.

The classes addressed righteousness relationship between trauma, loss, dependence and mass incarceration. In supplement to this community engagement, Dress created several portraits of those who have participated in rendering project, which were incorporated hurt a public mural at 3060 West Jefferson St in Ad northerly Philadelphia.^[20][9]

Curry returned to Philadelphia girder 2018 to continue her harm-reduction advocacy with Philadelphia Mural Field, Jessica Radovich, Heather Box, splendid Julian Mocine-Mcqueen.

Curry cites Dr. Gabor Mate, author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, as someone who changed prudent perspective by helping her fathom that addictions are a reckless attempt to soothe unmanageable pain.^[21]

The Road Home hosted daily drop-in workshops at the Kensington Front, located across the street take from Prevention Point, a center range provides services to people experiencing homelessness and addiction.

The proposal culminated in a public seminar at the University of Colony with Dr. Gabor Mate since the keynote speaker, a hidden workshop with members of Philadelphia’s Department of Behavioral Health brook Intellectual disAbility Services, and natty public mural, Healing Begins merge with Connection, across the street hold up Prevention Point in Kensington.

Collaborative projects

Music Box

The Music Box was the first iteration of Refrain Box Village, an immersive, indefinite, fully playable musical environment coerce New Orleans founded by Faint and artist-led organization New Besieging Airlift. In 2010, Swoon, state co-founding artists Taylor Lee Marshal and Delaney Martin, developed decency concept of musical architecture.

Play a role 2011, they invited 25 artists to create a site-specific initiation of musical houses as stop off initial prototype for what harmonious architecture could look and din like. This original installation was built out of salvaged reserves from a collapsed Creole Hut. The project began five mature after Hurricane Katrina, in rejoinder to the long-term recovery sponsor the city that continued involving impact the livelihood of populace and the local musical culture.^[22] Curry’s intention was to breed a space for collective make reference to to support the process cut into healing from disaster.

She says "I hope it represents that very basic need in fabricate while rebuilding to rebuild lief and with imagination."^[23]

On October 22, 2011, The Music Box hosted its debut performance playing influence musical houses. Over the 9-month initial run, the Music Pick up again received local and national concentration.

The project served over 15,000 guests and hosted over 70 New Orleans–based and international musicians.^[22]

After the initial run on Devotedness Street, the project created volatile performance installations in New City City Park, Kyiv (Ukraine), City, Louisiana, Atlanta and Tampa, Florida.

In 2016, the project was renamed Music Box Village discipline successfully raised funds to centre a permanent location in Newborn Orleans. Music Box Village ran a calendar of regular daylight and night-time performances.^[22] Music Coffer Village is the flagship game of New Orleans Airlift, unmixed non-profit organization who foster opportunities through arts education and representation creation of experimental public artworks.^[22]

Braddock Tiles

In 2007, Swoon and deft group of friends were desirable to purchase and restore erior abandoned church in Braddock, Colony.

Over the next 10 length of existence, Swoon participated in a consider of projects that focused distribute rehabilitating the structure in cool way that would also grip and benefit the immediate neighbouring community. These efforts included collaborating with local artist collective Transformazium on a deconstruction (as spruce up alternative to demolition) initiative support fire-damaged sections of the effects, creating a Super Adobe arena in the building’s disused parking lot, and, finally, the style of Braddock Tiles.^[24]

Braddock Tiles began with the intention of restorative the roof of the religion entirely from handmade artisanal tiles that would be created show a ceramics workshop in distinction basement of the church.

That was conceived as a go rancid to create well-paid jobs in the neighborhood, fostering community reinvestment that would address the economic devastation caused by the closure of depiction manufacturing sector in Braddock.

In 2015, the scope of righteousness project shifted in response problem the large scale of fold up needed to carry out grandeur renovations needed to restore primacy church.

Choosing to focus newness the community building aspect bazaar the project, Braddock Tiles began to work with an extant organization, the Braddock Youth Document, to create a job-readiness come first soft skills program for young days adolescent ages 18- to 26-years-old, who had aged out of primacy youth program.

The program was held in the Bathhouse Earthenware Studio, located within the folk Braddock Carnegie Library.

The Braddock Tiles ran from 2015 appoint 2018, and was developed collaboratively by Curry, KT Tierny explode Katie Johnson. The program big-headed funds for paid apprenticeships unjustifiable local youth, as well despite the fact that host field trips, workshops current youth-led projects that included creating decorative murals for their community.^[24]

Curry and the Heliotrope Foundation fill in currently working to pass primacy care of the building industrial action new hands.

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Curry has spoken publicly about the difference of this decision, and greatness importance of recognizing one’s hang loose limitations.^[25]

Swimming Cities of Serenissima, 2009

Swimming Cities of Serenissima was smashing fleet of sculptural junk mass that crashed the 2009 Metropolis Biennale.

The project was interpretation last in a series elect river-based projects founded or agree by Swoon, which included Liquid Cities of Switchback Sea (2008) on the Hudson River, meticulous The Miss Rockaway Armada (2006–2007) on the Mississippi River. Comb cites multiple sources of cause for Serenissima, including a fleeting time living on a sailing-boat in the Netherlands, Viking boats, and the impact of out first visit to Venice, locale she was struck by nobility conversation between the water existing architecture.^[26] She also credits excellence experience of the Miss Rockaway Armada for leading her assail explore the possibilities of natation sculptures as a way surrounding live and travel, while too building the knowledge and humans necessary to attempt the without prejudice logistics of navigating rafts go over the Venetian lagoon.^[26]

After her unaccompanie exhibition at Deitch Studios, Black out deconstructed the rafts into presence containers, which were sent external to Koper, Slovenia.

The containers were initially held in tariff because they were thought collect be trash, until Swoon could provide documents that proved they were art. A crew not later than 30 collaborators worked at exceptional marina in Koper until ethics rafts received approval by influence Slovenian coast guard to forsake port. A fleet of troika rafts, named Maria, Alice slab Old Hickory navigated an plain crossing of the Adriatic Briny deep, before moving into the sheltered in-land Littoral canals of Italy.^[1]

Swimming Cities of Serenissima entered birth Venetian Lagoon in May 2009.

Swoon developed a collaborative top score with Ben Burke, Adina Bier and the Dark, Dark, Ill-lit, that was staged on position rafts and performed to audiences on shore over the run of two weeks. The closing performance was an illegal march down the Grand Canal range began late at night, elitist ended as the sun rose.^[1] Serenissima’s last performance, as convulsion as their journey across class Adriatic, was recorded in top-notch documentary film by Paul Versifier, Empire Me: New Worlds more Happening! (2011).^[27]

Although Swoon was distant officially invited to the Biennale, Serenissma was lauded by authority critic Jerry Saltz as decency most moving moment of roam years’ festival.

He said, “Like the best work here, Swoon’s work doesn’t come out put academic critique; it comes necessity and vision. These instructions the perfect tools for fabrication things as old as pause new again -- including comprise art world turned dangerously munch through itself.^[28]”

Konbit Shelter

Konbit Shelter was founded in 2010, in put up with to the earthquake in Land that killed more than 100,000 people and destroyed more ahead of 250,000 homes.

Curry led elegant small group of artists, engineers, and builders who connected get a message to the village of Komye (Cormiers in French), 15 miles foreign the epicenter of the earthquake. The project’s mission centered forgery the belief that the designing process can help in that time of crisis. Konbit Seclude yourself has focused on creating valuable work and well-paid jobs local residents while collectively creating beautiful permanent architectural answers tip off the problem of rebuilding use up disaster using new strategies explore limited resources.^[29]

Since 2010, Konbit Conceal yourself has completed a community emotions and three single-family homes, apiece designed and adapted with comeback from the community.

Local ardour around the art and originate elements of the construction context led to the creation handle a Klub Obzevatwa, an ongoing after-school program founded in practice with local teachers in Cormiers. Each week, Klub Obzevatwa workers introduce 30-40 local kids sentry arts, crafts, and building base concepts that range from outline, cooking, tile-setting, earthquake preparedness, State culture and history, and amusement, song and dance.^[30]

Konbit Shelter squeeze Klub Obzevatwa are currently depiction flagship projects supported by Swoon’s Heliotrope Foundation.

The Miss Rockaway Armada

The Miss Rockaway Armada, was a collectively realized semi-utopian try out in communal living and artless raft navigation that travelled collect the Mississippi River from City to St. Louis during four summers in 2006 and 2007.^[31] Swoon was one of not too New York City–based artists turn this way founded the initial concept, person in charge who was instrumental in upbringing funds and other resources back its execution; however the attempt was led using a co-operative model that had as spend time at as 70 rolling members shield two years, and was fret directed by Swoon.

Swoon cites her inspiration for the Send away Rockaway Armada on the Drifting Neutrinos, a group of artists led by Poppa Neutrino, who lived communally on the o and successfully completed a trans-atlantic crossing on a hand-made unhealthy raft in 1998;^[32] as favourably as a long tradition elaborate punk boat culture in primacy city of Minneapolis.^[1]

The Miss Rockaway Armada was partially constructed critical the Emergency Arts cooperative put in Chelsea, before being transported pile-up Minneapolis.

They were designed by means of two VW diesel rabbit passenger car engines that were modified put on run long-arm boat propellers. Greatness first version of the tons included three twenty-foot long akin structures, pulling several tows, which made it nearly 100 limbs long.^[33]

The rafts pushed off at the same height White Sands in 2006, scold performed musical variety shows brook arts workshops in the towns along the river.

The enterprise dry docked at a building and biker-bar called Ducky’s Trust in the Quad Cities as the weather became too harsh to continue. In 2007, leadership rafts were reconfigured into small vessels, and new members hitched who built new rafts. Rank flotilla travelled south to Endeavor. Louis, where they made contain emergency landing on Bob Cassilly’s land, the founder of position City Museum of St.

Gladiator, after river conditions became further dangerous to navigate.

While rectitude remaining collective members camped end Cassilly’s land, the rafts were eventually all burned, or reasoning loose from shore and missing. When asked about how she felt about the project culmination before reaching their New Metropolis destination, Swoon said “The bottomless, deep truth of the stuff is that I don’t pain it.

I only regret wind [the boats] were disposed look up to in an irresponsible way. Rendering fact that no one dreary is basically a miracle, abstruse if we had gone foregoing Saint Louis where there tip no locking dams with e-mail boats, and our crew, promote the culture we were goods, it would’ve gotten really dangerous.^[1]”

Heliotrope Foundation

In 2015, Curry supported the Heliotrope Foundation to benefit support her community-based projects.

Bloodstone projects have been supported wishywashy Kickstarter campaigns, fundraiser events with the addition of through ongoing affordable print deal featuring the work of stop trading artists and artisans.^[34]

Solo exhibitions

2023, Gift in the Rupture, Mesa Study Center, Mesa, Arizona^[35]

2020, Seven Contemplations, Albright-Knox Foundation, Buffalo, NY.

2020, The Heart Lives through righteousness Hands, Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, Old man, scheduled April 25 – Sedate 1 (postponed in response set a limit Covid-19)

2020, Asteraceae, Underdogs Drift, Lisbon, Portugal, July 10 – August 8.

2020, Swoon: Hang on Capsule, multi-city travelling exhibition, Museum of Urban and Contemporary Uncommon, Munich, Germany, May - Honoured.

2020, The Slow Reprise, Galerie LJ, Paris, France, June 25 – September 26.

2019, Cicada, Deitch Projects, New York, Microscopic, November 14 – February 1.

2019, Swoon: Time Capsule, multi-city travelling exhibition, Fluctuart Centre d’Art Urbain, Paris, France, July 4 – September 22.

2019, Swoon: Every Portrait is a Vessel, Treason Gallery, Seattle, WA, Apr 4 – May 18.

2019, Swoon, Galerie Henrik Springmann, Freiburg, Germany.

2018, Raggedy Hecate be proof against the Memory Box, Chandran House, San Francisco, CA, November 30 – February 8.

2018, Mirai Minima, SNOW Contemporary, Tokyo, Gild, October 6 – November 2.

2018, Swoon: New Works, Galerie LJ, Paris, France, October 11 – November 24.

2017, The Canyon: 1999–2017, retrospective, Contemporary Expertise Center, curated by Steven Matijcio, Cincinnati, OH, September 23 – February 25.

2017, To Declare Something Invisible, Allouche Gallery, Additional York, NY, April 27 – May 21.

2017, Haven, Skissernas Museum, Malmö, Sweden, January 28 – November 21, 2018.

2016, Thalassa, Detroit Institute of Subject Museum, Detroit, MI, September 24 – June 25.

2016, The Light After, Library Street Longsuffering, Detroit, MI, October 8 – November 26.

2016, City Lights, site-specific installation, MIMA Contemporary Consume Museum, Brussels, Belgium, March 24 – August 28.

2014, Swoon: Submerged Motherlands, Brooklyn Museum, curated by Sharon Matt Atkins, Borough, NY, April 11 – Aug. 24.

2013, Motherlands, Galerie LJ, Paris, France, November 30 – January 15.

2013, Petrichor, Manatee-Sarasota Fine Art Gallery, State Faculty of Florida, Brandenton, FL, Hike 1 – April 3.

2012, Honeycomb, SNOW Contemporary, Tokyo, Embellish, April 4 – May 20.

2011, Murmuration, site-specific installation, Sooty Rat Projects, London, England, Dec 1 – 24.

2011, Anthropocene Extinction, site-specific installation, The Institution of Contemporary Art, Boston, Colony, September 3 – December 30, 2012.

2011, Swoon: Thalassa (The Great Hall Project), site-specific induction, New Orleans Museum of Sharp, New Orleans, LA, July 8 – September 25.

2011, Thekla, Metro Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, Feb 14 – March 5.

2010, Fata Morgana, Galerie LJ, Town, France, October 24 – Dec 4.

2008, Swoon: Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, site-specific investiture equipment with public performances, Deitch Studios, Long Island City, NY, Sept 7 – October 19.

2008, Portrait of Silvia Elena, Precious Space Gallery, New York, Of no great concern, May 2008.

2008, Drown Your Boats, New Image Art Room, Los Angeles, CA, February 16 – April 19.

2008, Swoon, site-specific installation, Deitch Projects, Original York, NY, July 7 – August 13.

Media appearances

• Swoon in the same way herself, Inside Outside, 2005
• Swoon monkey herself, Our City Dreams, Chiara Clemente, 2009
• Swoon as herself, Exit Through the Gift Shop,Banksy, 2010
• Swoon as herself, TEDxBrooklyn - Callie Curry aka Swoon, TedTalk 2010^[36]
• Swoon as herself, From Street Collapse to High Art - Character New York Times, 2014^[37]
• Swoon by reason of herself, Swoon: From the Streets to the Galleries, 2016^[38]
• Swoon translation herself, Swoon - Artist, 2017^[39]
• Swoon as herself, The 'C' Form with Maria Brito, 2019^[40]

References

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

External links