Swoon is a contemporary American artist best known for her street art illustrative portraiture. Working in a wide-ranging practice that includes installation and performance, her work is often civically motivated. Swoon?s large-scale images are painted cutouts figures on recycled paper and glued to the sides of urban architecture using wheat paste.
Born Caledonia Dance Curry in 1978 in New London, CT, Swoon moved to New York, to attend the Pratt Institute. Her work gained recognition after a solo show at Jeffrey Deitch?s SoHo gallery in 2005, quickly attracting the attention of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her solo show ?Submerged Motherlands? at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014 was the museum?s first exhibition dedicated to a living street artist. Swoon currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Swoon?s signature works include life-size human forms that she creates from recycled papers. It takes her weeks to paint and cut out each figure in her studio, and once the forms are complete, she takes them to the streets. When Swoon first began creating Street Art, she focused her energy on things that were meant to disappear and her ability to let them go.
Swoon was heavily influenced by Gordon Matta-Clark who was well-known for his temporary works in the city streets. In his series Building Cuts, he went on location to buildings that were scheduled to be demolished and created works of art from sections he had cut from doorways, walls, floors, and ceilings.