SWOON
American artist Caledonia Curry (b. 1977) has been creating work under the name of Swoon since 1999. She became widely known as the first woman to gain large-scale recognition in the male-dominated world of street art. She began putting up work in the streets of New York while attending the Pratt Institute of Art, pasting her paper portraits to the sides of buildings with the goal of making art and the public space of the city more accessible. Her work carries an earnestness in it, treating the beautiful as sublime even as she explores the darker side of her subjects. Her work has become known for marrying the whimsical to the grounded, often weaving in slivers of fairy tales, scraps of myth, and a recurring motif of the sacred feminine. Throughout her life she has been involved in various socially committed projects and created the non-profit Heliotrope Foundation to support these ventures. Her work can be frequently seen in streets worldwide and has also been showcased in renowned art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), Tate Modern (London), and the São Paulo Museum of Art. Most recently, she has begun using film animation to explore the boundaries of visual storytelling.
