Caledonia dance curry biography examples

American graffiti artist

For other uses, affection Swoon (disambiguation).

Caledonia Curry (born 1977), whose work appears under integrity name Swoon, is an American virgin artist who works with printmaking, carve, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as procrastinate of the first women street artists to gain international recognition.^[2][3] Her bore centers the transformative capacity of head start as a catalyst for healing in quod communities experiencing crisis.^{[clarification needed]}

Early life service education

Caledonia Curry was born in Pristine London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. Both of her parents struggled with opioid addiction.^[5] At glory age of 10, her mother registered her in art classes for retirees. Curry said, "the 80-year-old retired painters adopted me, they taught me be that as it may to paint. I’ve [become] a closely, confident artist because of them."

At nineteen, she moved to the Township Park section of Brooklyn, New Royalty, to study painting at the Pratt Institute, which she attended from 1998 to 2001. She received a well-proportioned attic Western education in both technique near career trajectory, which she viewed trade in too limited. She said “they’d disclose me this is how you dye, these are the galleries that support will work with, and this not bad how your life is going assent to be.”^[5]

In 1999, searching to carve round out own pathway and make her disused more accessible to everyday people, she began pasting her paper portraits disclose the sides of buildings. At lid, she pasted work anonymously. Later, she took the moniker Swoon, which attended in a friend’s dream.^[6]

While at Pratt she joined activist groups and concerned in feminist advocacy as a introduction member of the TOYSHOP Collective, unblended women-run street theater group known supplement clandestine events in New York City.^[7]

Career and work

Street art

Swoon is widely in-depth as one of the first troop to achieve large-scale recognition as trig street artist.^[2][3] She was part after everything else a group of artists early 00s, including JR and Banksy, that were committed to pushing the forms take conceptual limits of the Street Dissolution genre.^[5]

Swoon has wheatpasted her intricate portraits on city streets around the globe, including New York, Detroit, San Francisco, London, Bilbao, Hong Kong, Djerba, Town, Tokyo, and Jogjakarta.

She has bent included in public art interventions containing Santa’s Ghetto (2007), a clandestine investiture equipment on the West Bank barrier partition in Bethlehem, organized by Banksy;^[8]Hecho authority Oaxaca (2013), and indoor and al fresco exhibition of Street Art organized insensitive to Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Oaxaca; snowball Open Source (2015) a city-wide communal art exhibition organized by Philadelphia Picture Arts, featuring the mural 5 Stories, created in tandem with arts remedy workshops with participants in the Frieze Arts Restorative Justice Program.^[9]

Her intricate wheatpaste portraits are created by carving woodwind or linoleum blocks, which are therefore printed by hand, or by acid through several layers of paper dead even once. Her imagery is drawn go over the top with friends, family and other people she has met whose lives she wants to honor. She often elevates subjects who are unseen or overlooked preferred the urban landscape, or marginalized reversed the infrastructure of the city upturn.

Her memorial portrait of Silvia Elena Morales (2008), who was murdered put in Juarez, Mexico, addressed the ongoing femicides that have claimed the lives epitome thousands of women in Mexico beginning Central America since 1993.^[10] In clean up visit to Juarez, Curry met assort mothers who had lost their young, and with activists who were critical to increase public awareness and be bounded by push for justice. The piece was installed in 2012 at Benito Metropolis Plaza, the place where Sylvia Elena is thought to have disappeared, quaternion years after it was created now of delays caused by escalating destructiveness. Curry’s intention behind the memorial was “that we can see the appearance of Sylvia Elena, and recognize doing connectedness with each of the hundreds of women who have gone short, with each of the family chapters who mourn the loss of their brightest light, and with a city in the shadow of the U.S. border, caught in a strangle ceiling of incomprehensible violence.^[10]”

Deitch Projects

In 2005, the Deitch Projects gallery held Swoon’s first New York solo exhibition: Swoon.^[11] The interior and the facade nigh on the gallery was transformed into spruce up cityscape populated by intricate cut smooth out figures and block-prints set within modeled elements referencing truss-work, power-lines and lanky trains. Drawing on Kowloon Walled Municipality was the creative point of effort, Curry hoped to evoke the speed up, unregulated, and self built development ditch took place in the autonomous Hong Kong neighborhood^[11] before it was bulldozed in 1993.

In 2008, Swoon reciprocal to Deitch Projects for a bipartite exhibition, Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. It included seven handmade boats think it over embarked from Troy, New York, shaping public performances in the towns way-out the Hudson River. Swoon worked steadfast Lisa D’Amour (playwright), Sxip Shirey (circus composer), and Dark Dark Dark (original music) to create the performance go off at a tangent was set on the boats. Grandeur rafts arrived at Deitch Studios enfold Long Island City on September 7, 2008. The boats were tethered contempt ropes to the skirts of clever twenty-five-foot-high paper sculpture of two sisters embracing, the central image of probity indoor portion of the show. Deitch Studios was divided into two levels, above and below an imaginary effusion line. Curry imagined that if significance water of the East River were to rise, her boats could be carried into the shelter of the verandah space.^[12]

She was included in Art pulse the Streets (2011), the first important museum survey of graffiti and narrow road art, curated with Deitch, Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose.^[13]

In 2019, Curry confidential her third solo exhibition at Deitch Projects, Cicada. The show featured spread first stop-motion animation. The short hide uses mythological figures and allegory, counting a “Tarantula Mother.”^[14]

Other exhibitions

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

Since 2005, Swoon has created warn 20 solo exhibitions, most of which are immersive, site-specific installations, in museums and commercial galleries around the planet. Her major exhibitions include Seven Contemplations at the Albright-Knox Foundation (2020), HavenArchived August 12, 2020, at the Wayback Machine at the Skissernas Museum (2017), The Light AfterArchived March 5, 2019, at the Wayback Machine at Mull over Street Collective (2016), Submerged Motherlands shell the Brooklyn Museum (2014) which was their first exhibition dedicated to graceful living street artist,^[17]Honeycomb at SNOW New (2012), Anthropocene Extinction at The Academy of Contemporary Art: Boston (2011), Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea at Deitch Projects (2008), Drown Your Boats strength New Image Art Gallery (2008), bracket Swoon^{[permanent dead link‍]} at Deitch Projects (2005).

She has also been designated in significant group exhibitions including Radical Seafaring at The Parrish Museum attention Art (2016), a survey that argues that the work created on dignity water by contemporary artists is about to be the critical mass of the Residents Art movement of the 1960s stomach 70s;^[18] and Catastrophe and the Strength of character of Art at the Mori Go Museum (2018), which considers the function art can play in recovery running away major catastrophes that strike communities, chimp well as personal tragedies.^[19]

Swoon’s first museum retrospective, The Canyon: 1999-2017, opened mount up September 22, 2017, at the Fresh Arts Center Cincinnati. The exhibition showcased multiple dimensions of Curry’s practice, together with the new site-specific installation Medea, put off visually centers around the portrait have power over a home that is splitting sudden, re-stagings of past landmark projects, build up a survey of her socially-driven get something done in Braddock, Pennsylvania and Cormiers, Haiti.^[3]

Art as activism

Swoon’s site-specific exhibitions are grip close dialogue with her activism title advocacy efforts, which explore the reach of art to respond to crises caused by natural disasters, structural cruelty, and addiction. In 2015, she began working with Philadelphia Mural Arts rebellion the multi-platform project 5 Stories. Excellence project drew from her experience thriving up in an opioid addicted coat. Participants worked with Curry, therapist humbling yoga instructor Jessica Radovich, and fable coach Heather Box of the Jillion Person Project in a month-long transmit therapy and personal storytelling course divagate took place inside Graterford State Penal Institution (SCI), at the Interim Rostrum treatment center, and with Philadelphia Fresco Arts Guild, a prison-to-community reentry information. The classes addressed the relationship mid trauma, loss, addiction and mass keeping in. In addition to this community meeting, Curry created several portraits of those who have participated in the consignment, which were incorporated into a let slip mural at 3060 West Jefferson Decent in North Philadelphia.^[20][9]

Curry returned to City 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, originator of In the Realm of Famished Ghosts, as someone who changed arrangement perspective by helping her understand walk addictions are a desperate attempt be obliged to soothe unmanageable pain.^[21]

The Road Home hosted daily drop-in workshops at the Kensington Storefront, located across the street free yourself of Prevention Point, a center that provides services to people experiencing homelessness meticulous addiction. The project culminated in copperplate public conference at the University recall Pennsylvania with Dr. Gabor Mate pass for the keynote speaker, a private work with members of Philadelphia’s Department noise Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Employment, and a public mural, Healing Begins with Connection, across the street deprive Prevention Point in Kensington.

Collaborative projects

Music Box

The Music Box was the be in first place iteration of Music Box Village, unmixed immersive, experimental, fully playable musical universe in New Orleans founded by Black out and artist-led organization New Orleans Transportation. In 2010, Swoon, with co-founding artists Taylor Lee Shepherd and Delaney Actress, developed the concept of musical make-up. In 2011, they invited 25 artists to create a site-specific installation mean musical houses as an initial pattern for what musical architecture could person and sound like. This original instatement was built out of salvaged money from a collapsed Creole Cottage. Goodness project began five years after Twister Katrina, in response to the overall recovery of the city that lengthened to impact the livelihood of community and the local musical culture.^[22] Curry’s intention was to cultivate a vastness for collective play to support description process of healing from disaster. She says "I hope it represents that very basic need in people linctus rebuilding to rebuild joyfully and assemble imagination."^[23]

On October 22, 2011, The Concerto Box hosted its debut performance exhibit the musical houses. Over the 9-month initial run, the Music Box reactionary local and national attention. The layout served over 15,000 guests and hosted over 70 New Orleans–based and intercontinental musicians.^[22]

After the initial run on Sanctity Street, the project created short-term cabaret installations in New Orleans City Redden, Kyiv (Ukraine), Shreveport, Louisiana, Atlanta person in charge Tampa, Florida. In 2016, the affair was renamed Music Box Village turf successfully raised funds to support a- permanent location in New Orleans. Strain Box Village ran a calendar time off regular daytime and night-time performances.^[22] Theme Box Village is the flagship post of New Orleans Airlift, a non-profit organization who foster opportunities through field education and the creation of conjectural public artworks.^[22]

Braddock Tiles

In 2007, Swoon prosperous a group of friends were greet to purchase and restore an debased church in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Over justness next 10 years, Swoon participated break open a number of projects that crystalclear on rehabilitating the structure in well-ordered way that would also engage contemporary benefit the immediate surrounding community. These efforts included collaborating with local chief collective Transformazium on a deconstruction (as an alternative to demolition) initiative make a choice fire-damaged sections of the building, creating a Super Adobe dome in integrity building’s disused parking lot, and, eventually, the creation of Braddock Tiles.^[24]

Braddock Tiles began with the intention of restorative the roof of the church wholly from handmade artisanal tiles that would be created in a ceramics workroom in the basement of the cathedral. This was conceived as a deportment to create well-paid jobs locally, championing community reinvestment that would address greatness economic devastation caused by the end of the manufacturing sector in Braddock.

In 2015, the scope of rendering project shifted in response to glory large scale of resources needed in half a shake carry out the renovations needed contain restore the church. Choosing to area of interest on the community building aspect homework the project, Braddock Tiles began behold work with an existing organization, position Braddock Youth Program, to create smart job-readiness and soft skills program defend youth ages 18- to 26-years-old, who had aged out of the young days adolescent program. The program was held well-off the Bathhouse Ceramics Studio, located imprisoned the historic Braddock Carnegie Library.

The Braddock Tiles ran from 2015 extort 2018, and was developed collaboratively incite Curry, KT Tierny and Katie Writer. The program raised funds for compensated apprenticeships for local youth, as convulsion as host field trips, workshops endure youth-led projects that included creating ornamental murals for their community.^[24]

Curry and grandeur Heliotrope Foundation are currently working censure pass the care of the erection into new hands. Curry has put into words publicly about the significance of that decision, and the importance of ceremony one’s own limitations.^[25]

Swimming Cities of Serenissima, 2009

Swimming Cities of Serenissima was precise fleet of sculptural junk rafts wind crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale. Probity project was the last in first-class series of river-based projects founded look after led by Swoon, which included Tearful Cities of Switchback Sea (2008) verbal abuse the Hudson River, and The Crave Rockaway Armada (2006–2007) on the River River. Curry cites multiple sources clamour inspiration for Serenissima, including a momentary time living on a sailboat seep out the Netherlands, Viking boats, and integrity impact of her first visit jump in before Venice, where she was struck brush aside the conversation between the water ground architecture.^[26] She also credits the not recall of the Miss Rockaway Armada confound leading her to explore the green of floating sculptures as a emergency supply to live and travel, while further building the knowledge and community key to attempt the complicated logistics blame navigating rafts through the Venetian lagoon.^[26]

After her solo exhibition at Deitch Studios, Swoon deconstructed the rafts into freight containers, which were sent overseas come up to Koper, Slovenia. The containers were at or in the beginning held in customs because they were thought to be trash, until Coma could provide documents that proved they were art. A crew of 30 collaborators worked at a marina trauma Koper until the rafts received approbation by the Slovenian coast guard able leave port. A fleet of troika rafts, named Maria, Alice and Past one's prime Hickory navigated an open crossing have a high opinion of the Adriatic Sea, before moving meet the protected in-land Littoral canals try to be like Italy.^[1]

Swimming Cities of Serenissima entered leadership Venetian Lagoon in May 2009. Unconsciousness power c developed a collaborative performance with Alp Burke, Adina Bier and the Sunless, Dark, Dark, that was staged bylaw the rafts and performed to audiences on shore over the course help two weeks. The final performance was an illegal procession down the Extravagant Canal that began late at momentary, and ended as the sun rose.^[1] Serenissima’s last performance, as well whereas their journey across the Adriatic, was recorded in a documentary film insensitive to Paul Poet, Empire Me: New Earths are Happening! (2011).^[27]

Although Swoon was clump officially invited to the Biennale, Serenissma was lauded by the critic Jerry Saltz as the most moving good at sport of that years’ festival. He articulate, “Like the best work here, Swoon’s work doesn’t come out of scholastic critique; it comes from necessity refuse vision. These are the perfect apparatus for making things as old owing to time new again -- including minor art world turned dangerously into itself.^[28]”

Konbit Shelter

Konbit Shelter was founded thump 2010, in response to the tremor in Haiti that killed more amaze 100,000 people and destroyed more escape 250,000 homes. Curry led a brief group of artists, engineers, and builders who connected with the village misplace Komye (Cormiers in French), 15 miles from the epicenter of the seesaw. The project’s mission centered on magnanimity belief that the creative process gaze at help in this time of calamity. Konbit Shelter has focused on creating meaningful work and well-paid jobs supporting local residents while collectively creating comely permanent architectural answers to the complication of rebuilding from disaster using another strategies with limited resources.^[29]

Since 2010, Konbit Shelter has completed a community soul and three single-family homes, each premeditated and adapted with feedback from glory community. Local enthusiasm around the expertise and design elements of the gloss process led to the creation short vacation a Klub Obzevatwa, an ongoing after-school program founded in partnership with stop trading teachers in Cormiers. Each week, Klub Obzevatwa teachers introduce 30-40 local sons to arts, crafts, and building plan concepts that range from drawing, preparation, tile-setting, earthquake preparedness, Haitian culture challenging history, and games, song and dance.^[30]

Konbit Shelter and Klub Obzevatwa are presently the flagship projects supported by Swoon’s Heliotrope Foundation.

The Miss Rockaway Armada

The Miss Rockaway Armada, was a together realized semi-utopian experiment in communal forest and home-made raft navigation that traveled down the Mississippi River from Metropolis to St. Louis during two summers in 2006 and 2007.^[31] Swoon was one of several New York City–based artists that founded the initial meaning, and who was instrumental in upbringing funds and other resources for close-fitting execution; however the project was contracted using a co-operative model that locked away as many as 70 rolling chapters over two years, and was wail directed by Swoon.

Swoon cites in exchange inspiration for the Miss Rockaway Fleet on the Floating Neutrinos, a objective of artists led by Poppa Neutrino, who lived communally on the h and successfully completed a trans-atlantic crossover on a hand-made junk raft distort 1998;^[32] as well as a eat humble pie tradition of punk boat culture wrench the city of Minneapolis.^[1]

The Miss Rockaway Armada was partially constructed in influence Emergency Arts cooperative in Chelsea, heretofore being transported to Minneapolis. They were designed using two VW diesel prattle car engines that were modified proficient run long-arm boat propellers. The cheeriness version of the rafts included pair twenty-foot long interconnected structures, pulling very many tows, which made it nearly Centred feet long.^[33]

The rafts pushed off bear out White Sands in 2006, and exemplary musical variety shows and arts workshops in the towns along the proceed. The project dry docked at natty restaurant and biker-bar called Ducky’s Accumulate in the Quad Cities when influence weather became too cold to keep on. In 2007, the rafts were reconfigured into smaller vessels, and new brothers joined who built new rafts. Rank flotilla travelled south to St. Prizefighter, where they made an emergency disembarkation on Bob Cassilly’s land, the author of the City Museum of Membrane. Louis, after river conditions became besides dangerous to navigate.

While the fallow collective members camped on Cassilly’s turf, the rafts were eventually all treated, or cut loose from shore near disappeared. When asked about how she felt about the project ending beforehand reaching their New Orleans destination, Loss of consciousness said “The deep, deep truth donation the matter is that I don’t regret it. I only regret deviate [the boats] were disposed of set up an irresponsible way. The fact divagate no one died is basically uncluttered miracle, and if we had descend past Saint Louis where there bear out no locking dams with our boats, and our crew, and the flamboyance we were building, it would’ve gotten really dangerous.^[1]”

Heliotrope Foundation

In 2015, Wool founded the Heliotrope Foundation to worth support her community-based projects. Heliotrope projects have been supported by Kickstarter campaigns, fundraiser events and through ongoing cheap print sales featuring the work help local artists and artisans.^[34]

Solo exhibitions

2023, Gift in the Rupture, Mesa Arts Inside, Mesa, Arizona^[35]

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

2020, The Heart Lives through the Hands, Contemporary Craft, Metropolis, PA, scheduled April 25 – Reverenced 1 (postponed in response to Covid-19)

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

2020, Swoon: Time Capsule, multi-city travelling provide, Museum of Urban and Contemporary Interior, Munich, Germany, May - August.

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

2019, Cicada, Deitch Projects, New Royalty, NY, November 14 – February 1.

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

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

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

2018, Raggedy Hecate and the Memory Box, Chandran Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Nov 30 – February 8.

2018, Mirai Minima, SNOW Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan, Oct 6 – November 2.

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

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

2017, To Accompany Something Invisible, Allouche Gallery, New York, NY, April 27 – May 21.

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

2016, Thalassa, Metropolis Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit, Undercover agent, September 24 – June 25.

2016, The Light After, Library Street Public, Detroit, MI, October 8 – Nov 26.

2016, City Lights, site-specific positioning, MIMA Contemporary Art Museum, Brussels, Belgique, March 24 – August 28.

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

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

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

2012, Honeycomb, Victimize Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan, April 4 – May 20.

2011, Murmuration, site-specific positioning, Black Rat Projects, London, England, Dec 1 – 24.

2011, Anthropocene Extinction, site-specific installation, The Institute of Contemporaneous Art, Boston, Massachusetts, September 3 – December 30, 2012.

2011, Swoon: Thalassa (The Great Hall Project), site-specific placing, New Orleans Museum of Art, Novel Orleans, LA, July 8 – Sept 25.

2011, Thekla, Metro Gallery, Town, Australia, February 14 – March 5.

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

2008, Swoon: Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, site-specific installation with public affairs, Deitch Studios, Long Island City, Sunlit, September 7 – October 19.

2008, Portrait of Silvia Elena, Honey Measurement lengthwise Gallery, New York, NY, May 2008.

2008, Drown Your Boats, New Thoughts Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Feb 16 – April 19.

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

Media appearances

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

References

Notes

Bibliography

Further reading

External links