Long Way From Home: The Art of Swoon
There is an oft-reported story about the early days of Swoon. She had been cutting peepholes in the plywood walls surrounding construction sites and inserting viewfinders where sunlight would illuminate her tiny collages of delicate papercuts. A local guy immediately discovered one not far from her Brooklyn home, and began revealing it to passersby, calling it “The Secret.” He was a well-known character on the block, a local greeter with a mental disability. People who listened—and, at his urging, took a peek—were always happier for doing so. He knew it, they felt it—“The Secret” was a little bit of magic, a point of connection, a moment of delight in the daily grind of probability.
Caledonia Dance Curry, the artist behind Swoon, has often spoken about the power of these moments, which can awaken wonder and engender change, even on a personal scale. It is an originating principle for Heliotrope, the foundation Curry launched last year to tackle crisis—from environmental catastrophe to psychological isolation and unemployment—through community-based projects and art.
For Curry, hearing the story of “The Secret”—how it came to life and brought people together—was a seminal moment. And everything she has done—from her well-known block-print portraits to the beautiful buildings she has helped construct in an earthquake-ravaged village in Haiti—might be seen as ripples emanating from that time one guy in Brooklyn found one small-scale intervention by a young woman from Daytona Beach, Florida.
Curry began putting up her work in streets in 1999, while still attending Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where the prescribed trajectory for an artist—to exhibit in white-wall galleries and enter the collections of wealthy patrons—felt completely removed from her experience or yearning. She wanted to impact the world, even if it meant slapping a homemade sticker onto a phone booth. Working directly on the street emboldened and energized her. She organized fellow-students to canvas low-hanging billboards and, within a short time, founded Toyshop, her first collective.
Toyshop was a group of artists who sought the transformation and reclamation of public space. They came together when Homeland Security was at the pinnacle of its influence. In response, they committed acts of public mudwrestling and junk-parade music making. Many Toyshop members would help Curry realize her first large-scale installation for Deitch Projects in 2005. And, after Hurricane Katrina, they would join her in building and inhabiting Miss Rockaway Armada, the first of three beautiful flotillas made of garbage. Fueled by corn oil and Curry’s preternatural enthusiasm, they would travel implausibly from Minneapolis to New Orleans, performing for people along the banks of the Mississippi River. But all that came later. In the early days, not long after the physical and psychological ruin of 9/11, they did what they could to fight the current of
suspicion and fear with tiny feats of joy and whimsy.
Knowing Curry’s family history, it’s easy to imagine how she might have taken a darker road. Born to heroin-addicted parents, Curry’s clearest, earliest memories are filled with delusional ravings, panic, and blood. Her parents split up after her father, holed up with a shotgun, was finally carried away by a SWAT team. And, while he eventually got clean, becoming a stable influence and his daughter’s hero, Curry’s mother rolled through rehabs, jails, and mental institutions, with only interludes of sobriety.
It was during one such moment of lucidity that Curry’s mother—whom she describes as principally kind, intensely sensitive, a little bit mischievous, and totally eccentric—enrolled the ten-year old in a community painting class. Curry’s fellow students were mostly retired seniors that painted seascapes. But they adored the girl and applauded her every effort.
Art gave Curry a language. It gave her joy. It gave her confidence. And it gave her a platform from which to launch into the wider world. At seventeen, she went to Prague as an exchange student (her mother frantically outfitted her with a bright red Marlboro jacket and matching luggage redeemed from a pile of empty cigarette packs), and then she arrived in New York, where her street art evolved into one of the city’s greatest covert pleasures.
Last year, when the Brooklyn Museum unveiled Swoon’s record-setting solo show Submerged Motherlands, it was lauded as a homecoming.
In fact, if not frequently Curry does always returns home to Brooklyn. After Hurricane Sandy, she was on hand to cleanup in the Rockaways, and to offer a tribute to New York’s resilience on the famous Houston Bowery mural wall. Her transitory paste-ups still appear on the streets—reminding us of our grandmother, our neighbor’s son, the beautiful woman in the park with the epic in her eyes—but Curry’s subjects are now more often drawn from her experiences abroad—Palestine, Mexico, Egypt, Brazil, Haiti, Kenya, anywhere art might make a difference.
The itinerary has been staggering.
In 2011 alone, Curry created three distinct, colossal installations—at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—addressing human impact on the environment. In the same year, Music Box—the musical shantytown she designed with New Orleans Airlift out of salvage from a 250-year old Creole cottage damaged during Hurricane Katrina—opened to the first of 15,000 visitors in the Bywater. This was after a grueling trip to Haiti, where Curry founded Konbit Shelter to construct disaster-resistant buildings.
They came together when Homeland Security was at the pinnacle of its influence. In response, they committed acts of public mud wrestling and junk-parade music making.
Art gave Curry a language. It gave her joy. It gave her confidence. And it gave her a platform from which to launch into the wider world.
For longtime fans, Submerged Motherlands was a moody, dreamy, melancholy experience offering both artifacts and insight from Curry’s many journeys. Lacy papercut foliage fluttered from the limbs of a sixty-foot tall sculpture of a Haitian mapou tree.
Between the ocean hued walls towered three well-known figures from Curry’s 2011 museum exhibits: Thalassa, a Greek sea goddess with a belly swirling with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish; Mrs. Bennett, a portrait of the late Australian aboriginal artist Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa; and The Ice Queen, whose composed nobility presided over crumbling glaciers and shattered ice crystals. Papercuts of elegant sealife—phaeodaria, ascidiae, aspidonia—climbed the walls and drifted across the floor.
Moored amidst winding tree roots were two weathered art barges, vessels from the world-famous Swimming Cities flotillas that floated down the Hudson River in 2008 and crossed the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia to crash the Venice Biennale in 2009. Walkie, modeled after a young Haitian boy, crouched amidst sea plants and filigreed flotsam. Kamayura, of the Xingu nations in Brazil, represented devastation in the Amazon; Neenee, a young girl from an impoverished rust-belt town in Pennsylvania, offered hope with Braddock Tiles, the abandoned church Curry and cohorts are converting into an arts-driven community center.
Finally, the warm and hopeful image of Dawn and Gemma—a mother and her breastfeeding newborn—rose over a meditation hut layered with intricate wasps’ comb. This place, where visitors were invited to sit, talk, and contemplate, held the most personal pieces in the exhibit—two heartbreaking tableaus depicting Curry’s own mother as a fetus, infant, adult, and finally, as a skeletal wraith on oxygen tubes.
It was no secret that Curry’s mother was diagnosed with cancer not long after Curry began work on Submerged Motherlands. In the months that followed her mother’s death, Curry began to publicly share about her childhood, raising awareness about the findings of Gabor Maté, whose ground-breaking work with skid-row addicts suggests all addiction is rooted in trauma. But she also had to make art, for herself, for the world, to connect and communicate, and to change.
We weren’t surprised to hear that Curry decided to take a year off. No new projects. Just drawing, carving, and Heliotrope—which now encompasses ongoing work with Music Box, Konbit Shelter, and Braddock Tiles. She couldn’t have known that this would be the year when she would also suddenly, devastatingly, lose her father. When we sought her out, we found in her Philadelphia, still in the clutches of grief, working through Mural Arts with people in rehabs and prisons, seeking to understand and be understood, finding connection. As always, we are staggered by her grace.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 36, which is sold out. Get our latest issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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