New York-based artist Caledonia Dance Curry, aka Swoon (b. 1978, Daytona Beach), is best known for her striking life-sized wheat-pasted prints and paper cutouts, which she often installs in city streets for passersby to encounter. Exploiting the ephemeral qualities of her chosen materials, Swoon creates a kind of guerrilla public art that embraces incidental wear and tear, effectively bypassing the ossifying effect of museum display. The figures she depicts have a timeless, quasi-mythic feel that inserts the enduring power of age-old representational traditions into a contemporary technique and setting. Inspired in part by German Expressionist printmaking, the artist renders her subjects in extraordinary detail, making frequent and imposing use of fine lines and negative space to bring each image to life.
Working with numerous collectives, including Glowlab, Toyshop, Justseeds, Black Label, Change Agent, the Madagascar Institute, and the Barnstormers, Swoon has made work for interior and exterior settings. She has altered billboards, mounted poster campaigns, and built sculptural installations, and as a founding member of the Miss Rockaway Armada, she helped construct boats from salvaged materials that the group piloted down the Mississippi River in 2006 and 2007. While Swoon’s methodology has clear roots in the graphic stylings of street art, the sheer range of her activity also reveals a commitment to a radically expanded notion of collaboration and public engagement.
Art in the Streets, the first major historical exhibition of graffiti and street art organized by an American museum, surveys the origins and history of the movement in the United States and traces its influence as it spread around the world. Privacy Policy