SWOON
Working under the artist name Swoon, Caledonia Curry is a classically trained visual artist and printmaker who has spent the last 13 years exploring the relationship between people and their built environment.
After graduating in 1999 with a degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, she began to pursue a less traditional path for her art in the form of street art. She has placed large scale outdoor print installations in cities around the world, and her artistic process is based on the idea that art is immersive, provocative, and transformative.
Caledonia uses scavenged and local materials and embraces print media as a potent means of action for social change.
In 2008, Caledonia organized a moving installation piece on the Hudson River, entitled Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. This large scale work consisted of seven handmade ships loaded with fellow artists that set sail down the divide of New York City and New Jersey. The exhibition attracted the attention of the New York Times. Similar large scale raft projects followed, and the team has taken their work down the Mississippi, as well as an extraordinary excursion that ended in their invasion of the 2009 Venice Biennale.
Caledonia is well known for her work as an instigator, activist, and collaborator. Her work is collected by the MoMa NY, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Tate Modern, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Mass Moca, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art among others.
For the past several years, Caledonia has also been traveling the United States and abroad, creating exhibitions and holding workshops, including being a keynote speaker for the TED Talks series in 2010. In addition to Braddock Tiles, she is currently collaborating with artists, architects, and engineers on another major community based initiative, Konbit Shelter, a sustainable building project with the objective of sharing knowledge and resources through the creation of homes and community spaces in post earthquake Haiti.
