Swoon

Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists. 

Swoon’s recent work has been focused on the relationship of trauma and addiction. Through community partnerships that center compassion and the transformative power of art, Curry draws on her personal history growing up in an opioid addicted family as a catalyst for connection and healing. Over the past 10 years, she has founded and developed collaborative multi-year projects in Braddock and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Komye, Haiti, that address crises ranging from natural disasters to the opioid epidemic.

During Swoon’s 2007 residency at Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center on Maui, Swoon created one of her first etchings-a portrait of one of her collaborators from her raft days navigating floating communes during the Miss Rockaway Armada project of 2006 and 2007. While at HuiPress, Swoon also led workshops with local youth creating large scale woodcut prints for community exhibition. Eight proofs from the edition were hand embellished with white highlights in Swoon's studio in spring of 2024.