SWOON

Albright-Knox Northland

September 26, 2020 - January 10, 2021

Curated by: Aaron Ott

Seven Contemplations is an installation of seven monumental works that craft a meditative journey for the viewer. Curry responds to the cavernous architecture of the 8,000 square foot Albright-Knox Northland with immersive works that cultivate a feeling of awe by looking outward to the immensity of the cosmos, and inward to our interior worlds. Drawing from her own contemplative practice, Curry pairs focal points in each installation with a guided, fixed-gaze meditation prompt. Touching on themes including love, loss, grief, suffering and forgiveness, the prompts explore the power of sitting with difficult emotions, and the possibility for growth and healing we can access through self-exploration and contemplation.

The installations featured in Seven Contemplations include iconic works from Curry’s career, Thalassa, Dawn and Gemma and Memento Mori, alongside newer works including the sculpture and sound installation Medea, Cosmos and the stop-motion animation Cicada.

Read the Meditation Prompts

Watch the Artist Talk: “Creativity, Healing from Trauma, and Collective Liberation” with Prentis Hemphill and Caledonia Curry.

Deitch Projects, New York, NY

November 14, 2019 - February 1, 2020

Cicada the exhibition is a site-specific installation that features the premiere screening of Curry’s first stop-motion animation of the same name, alongside minimalist pen and charcoal drawings of her close friends, and a re-staging of the puppets and other elements from the film. The central theme of the exhibition metaphorically connects the quiet, often gradual process of personal growth to the physical transformations of the cicada buried underground.

Cicada the animation is a continuation of themes Curry began exploring in the installation Medea in 2017. Seeking to understand the impact of intergenerational trauma and addiction in her family, she began a profound inward journey with psychedelic assisted therapy. In these sessions, she began to enter a regressive state from a very early period in her childhood, where she would speak in a baby voice. She started to bring along toys similar to ones she had as a child as props, to help process the memories where her psyche had become stuck. Raggedy Ann was originally one of these therapeutic props. After several sessions with the doll, Raggedy Ann told Curry “I’m old now. I can go.” This doll is the first prop from her therapy sessions that she began to incorporate into the film.

Two other central elements of the film — the house splitting open and the Tarantula Mother — build on motifs first used in Medea. In her home studio, she created immersive environments for these characters using scaled-down versions of the techniques she has developed over the past two decades in gallery installations. The deep work Curry was doing in her therapy sessions began to extend into her artistic process. Curry wondered what the characters and props she relied on to assist her in speaking while voiceless might express in the light of day.

Over the course of filming, the animation process became a physical metaphor for the dissociation she sought to understand through her therapy sessions. She worked intuitively, without a storyboard, allowing each frame to dictate the next. To create a short clip required hours of disjointed labor, constantly stopping and starting with only subtle shifts between. At a frame rate of 8 frames per second, the animations had a flickering quality that gestured to the gaps in information just under the surface as if they were the memories that remained lost. In this way, the unique ability of stop-motion animation to capture and express the dissociative quality of Curry’s inner experience mobilized the artistic process as an extension of her inner journey.

The formidable force of mythology was another approach Curry incorporated to give voice to the darkest corners of the human psyche. The goddess Hectate presides over birth and death and can see forward and backward in time. Medea, the sorceress best known for killing her children, was a priestess and devotee. Hectate appears in the animation as a kaleidoscopic spinning wheel, growing, changing and turning. In the myth of Persephone, it is the witch Hectate who allows Demeter to find her lost daughter in the depths of the underworld. Demeter, the embodiment of the nurturing mother and protectress, appears to envelop and heal the house split apart.

For Curry, the animation process was a way to locate demons within herself, look them in the eye and collaborate with them in order to diminish their destructive force. The central message in the film Cicada is the healing message contained in Hectate’s wheel: that the regenerative power held in these archetypal tales is not locked away in the past, but is available to accompany and assist us if we allow it.

Cicada is Curry’s third solo exhibition at the Deitch Projects, which was the premiere of the short film of the same name. Cicada the animation has been exhibited in Seven Contemplations at the Albright-Knox Foundation (2020), and is now part of their permanent collection. It was screened at Wholeness in Mind at Turner Carroll Gallery (2021) and Superchief Gallery NFT (2021).

Watch Cicada Mini-Doc by Frederic King

Sculpture and Sound Installation, 2017.

Medea is the Greek mythological sorceress who is best known for killing her two children. Medea, a sculpture and sound installation, contains a series of biographical portraits as well as a switchboard with audio clips gathered from psychology texts and fairy tales, as well as Curry’s own dreams and childhood memories. Through the creation of this installation, Curry makes physical the healing journey through the unconscious, confronting the intergenerational trauma passed through women in her family, and articulating the previously buried truth that in the course of a rocky childhood, Curry had reason to fear for her mortality under the care of an addicted and sometimes mentally unstable mother.

The switchboard first appeared in a waking vision when Curry was 15 years old. Her insides were a scramble of crossed wires and she had mixed up the channels which symbolized the connection between emotion and reaction. Cause was detached from effect and reactions had no bearing on events. As an adult, when she began talk therapy, and later psychedelic assisted therapy, she began to uncover deeply unconscious and dissociated memories. One image, a spider-woman called Tarantula Mother, was too unbearable to face.

Letting her unconscious lead, the first layer of the sculpture, and the roots of understanding intergenerational trauma in her family, began with a portrait of her grandmother. Hard, distant and emotionally abusive, Ice Queen rests atop the house, a metaphor for the psyche. Underneath her, everything splits open. Next is Devouring, an image created in 2011 which is both a portrait of suffering and a talisman to keep suffering at bay. It represents a frightening moment Curry experienced as her mother’s health declined. Normally kind and good natured, her mother slipped into a rage where her eyes rolled backward, revealing to Curry the full weight of her demons. The next portrait Curry created of her, Memento Mori, depicts the last phase of her mother’s illness alongside images of her at earlier phases in her life. During this time period, her mother admitted that she had endured child sexual abuse by a family member. In this revelation, Curry believes, her mother discloses the source of unbearable pain she sought to ease through her lifelong struggle with addiction.

At the base of Medea sits Tarantula Mother. Her spider legs become the legs of a woman, opening into a surrealist psychosexual vulva. Atop her back sits a house filled with ancestors and memories. In the window, where there should be a protector, is the dissociated face of a woman, looking up and away from what’s happening below. Above is the classical image of Medea, throwing her children to their deaths. In this image, at the center of the sculpture, Curry confronts Tarantula Mother and brings her into the open.

As an installation, Medea physicalizes the metaphor of moving from fragmentation to wholeness, disassociation to re-association, by restoring connections between different layers of consciousness. The artistic process, specifically the way pictures give us access to pre-verbal parts of our psyche, became a way for Curry to locate, listen to, and ultimately believe herself as she articulated her own coherent truth from her deepest fears.

Medea was originally created for Curry’s mid-career retrospective, The Canyon, at CAC: Cincinnati (2017). It has been exhibited in the group exhibition Catastrophe and the Power of Art at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2018) and in her solo exhibition Seven Contemplations at the Albright-Knox Foundation (2020). Curry has written and spoken about the creation of Medea as a pivotal point in her career. In 2019 she gave a lecture about Medea in the context of psychedelic assisted therapy at the Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics Conference. It is also the subject of the introductory essay of Curry’s forthcoming book, Swoon: The Red Skein.

Artist Lecture, “Unearthing the Medea: The Intersection of Art and Psychedelic Assisted Therapy,” Caledonia Curry, Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics Conference, New York, NY, 2019.

Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati

September 23, 2017 - February 25, 2018

Curated by: Steven Matijcio

The Canyon is Swoon’s first major museum retrospective. Spanning nearly two decades of Curry’s career, The Canyon traces the evolution of Curry’s work from the early portraits she wheat pasted on city streets, to the ambitious sculptural installations and multi-year community-based projects. The title refers both to the cavernous interior space of the sweeping, Zaha Hadid designed CAC, as well as to how the striations along canyon walls mark the passage of time. Through examining these traces, Curry works within the retrospective framework to examine the various ways art becomes inseparable from life, building connections between public spaces, community collaborations and the inner-work of self-examination and personal growth. In The Canyon, Curry’s unique capacity to elevate how transcendence manifests in everyday life, while also giving voice to common, yet taboo experiences of suffering, inspire profound connections to her audience that empower others to share their own joys and struggles. By presenting the ambitious and expansive scope of her genre-defying early-to-mid career, The Canyon positions her as a major force in the contemporary art world, pushing the limits of how we define public art and influencing a generation of socially-engaged artists.

The Canyon unfolds across multiple floors, filling the 8,000 square foot Zaha Hadid-designed exhibition space. The survey includes over 18-years of print and papercut portraits originally pasted on the streets installed on densely layered sculptural assemblages that incorporate found objects and repurposed materials; re-presentations of iconic installations including her 2005 debut at Deitch Projects; two galleries devoted to her community-based projects in Braddock, Haiti and New Orleans; Thalassa, a monumental sculpture originally commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art; and the debut of Medea, a sound and sculptural installation that addresses the intergenerational history of trauma, sexual abuse and addiction through the women in her family.

Swoon: The Canyon Interview with Caledonia Curry

Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden

January 28, 2017 - November 21, 2018

Haven is a site-specific mural and exhibition that explores the experience of finding community as an outsider through a two-year storytelling collaboration with refugees in Malmö, Sweden and The Million Person Project. Sweden has opened its borders to the most refugees per capita of any other country. Generally considered an exception amongst western countries to hardline politics against people seeking asylum, at the height of the civil war in Syria, with over 6.6 million people displaced, the scale of the crisis began to shift public sentiment. With the goal of encouraging public dialogue between new neighbors, Curry examines her capacity as an artist to act as a bridge, creating meaningful connections and conversation between refugees and Swedish nationals.

Curry focuses on two encounters from these collaborations: Maram, a young Syrian woman, and Daniel, a young man from Afghanistan. A two-story-tall portrait of Maram laughing is the centerpiece of the exhibition, installed in the Skissernas Museum’s courtyard, capturing the sense of hope that Maram feels as she settles into her new life. The exhibition extends into the stairwell and Birgit Rausing Gallery, responding to the gallery’s architectural elements with screen-printed pattern wallpaper overlaid with Curry’s iconic portraits, capturing the feeling of safety, comfort and home.

Haven Artist Interview with Caledonia Curry.

Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, Detroit, MI. September 24 - June 25, 2016

New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA. July 8 - September 25, 2011

Thalassa was created in the months following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Growing up in Florida, Curry had a deep connection to this body of water. The magnitude of this environmental disaster felt inseparable from ourselves - the health of our bodies, and our role in the disaster. Turning to the divine power of Thalassa, the Greek goddess of the sea and a human/sea-creature hybrid, Curry found a protective force that represented the depth of our human relationship to the sea and the interconnectedness of all life. Thalassa is our first mother. Our bodies are oceanic.

In the installation, the 12-foot tall monumental block print is suspended from a 25ft tall ceiling, appearing to rise from the ocean. From underneath, the figure is encrusted with papercut forms and sea-life, giving viewers the impression of being underwater. Tendrils draped with flowing fabric extend from the central figure.

Thalassa was originally commissioned by the New Orleans Museum of Art (2011) for their Great Hall Project. It was exhibited at Detroit Institute of Arts (2016) in tandem with a community mural project in Detroit's Jefferson-Chalmers district, and the installation is now part of its permanent collection. Floor-standing versions of Thalassa have been exhibited at CAC Cincinnati (2017), Center for Contemporary Craft (2020) and the Albright-Knox Foundation (2020), which acquired the sculpture for their permanent collection .

Thalassa Artist Talk with Caledonia Curry, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2011.

Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY

May 8–July 24, 2016

Curated by Andrea Grover

Radical Seafaring is a multidisciplinary group exhibition of twenty-five contemporary artists working in waterways in the United States and Europe. It features works that range from artist-made vessels, to documentation of creative expeditions, to speculative designs for alternative communities on the water. Directed by Andrea Grover, Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects, the exhibition argues that the increasing number of artworks created on the water in the last decade is approaching the critical mass of a movement like Land art, only at sea.

The exhibition begins with conceptual and performance art of the 1960s and 70s and extends to recent phenomenological research and site-specific works that involve relocating the studio, the laboratory, or the performance space to the water. The exhibition places Swoon’s multi-year river projects, including Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (2008) and Swimming Cities of Serenissima (2009) into this larger context of water as a site for speculating new forms of collective living. Hickory, the floating vessel Swoon built to navigate from Koper, Slovenia to the Venetian lagoon to crash the 2009 Venice Biennale, is installed inside the museum, as a cornerstone to the exhibition. Along with the other artists featured in Radical Seafaring, Swoon’s work figures prominently in a universal, yet contemporary, inquiry: how do we live in a natural world from which we are detached not only physically but emotionally and intellectually. Her contributions apply direct engagement strategies that remove this distance and reignite a sensual, heuristic, and watchful understanding of the water.

The exhibition is divided into four themes: Exploration (the quest for new experiences, the ineffable, and living in an exhilarated state), Liberation (self-reliance, freedom from terrestrial social contracts, the desire to shape one’s world, and Utopian impulses), Fieldwork (hands-on, methodological intelligence gathering about the environment, such as an artist laboratory at sea), and Speculation (waterways as a tabula rasa on which other realities can be built).

The phenomenological works in Radical Seafaring represent a new form of expression that is especially powerful and timely as climatologists anticipate the effects of rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, and the impact on coastal zones—especially when one considers that half the world’s population lives within 200 miles of a sea coast.

The notion of the artist’s studio in the world, rather than separated from it, descends from art movements since the 1960s, including land, environmental, and conceptual art. Its forebears include Gordon Matta-Clark, Dennis Oppenheim, and Robert Smithson. The artists in Radical Seafaring are a continuation of these interdisciplinary, collaborative, and site-specific approaches. By narrowing this vast area of inquiry to projects on the water, Radical Seafaring provides focus and clarity to widespread creative strategies that embrace the world outside.

Artists

Bas Jan Ader, Ant Farm, Atelier Van Lieshout, Scott Bluedorn, George Brecht, Bruce High Quality Foundation, Chris Burden, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Steve Badgett and Chris Taylor, Michael Combs, Mark Dion, R. Buckminster Fuller, Cesar Harada, Constance Hockaday, Courtney M. Leonard, Mare Liberum, Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly, Vik Muniz, Dennis Oppenheim, The PLAY, Pedro Reyes, Duke Riley, Robert Smithson, Simon Starling, and Swoon

Exhibition Catalogue

Press

Jane L. Levere, “Review: Exhibition at Parrish Museum Celebrates Rule-Breaking,” The New York Times, June 6, 2016.

Allison Meier, “Navigating the Recent Wave of Renegade Seafaring in Art,” Hyperallergic, July 1, 2016.

Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI.

October 8 - November 26, 2016

The Light After is an immersive installation exploring the transition between life and death. Curry draws from her own empathetic death experience at the time of her mother’s passing, as well as the anecdotes of others who have lived through profound experiences where they themselves, or their loved ones, were close to dying. A near-death experience is a perceptual event that sometimes occurs when a person has succumbed to death and been resuscitated; an “empathetic death experience” is an experience whereby loved ones, caregivers, or even bystanders share in an experience of the dying person’s transition.

Death is a little understood frontier. Through advances in technology and resuscitation medicine, our ability to bring people back from death, after longer periods of time, has shed light on these experiences and brought them into our collective consciousness. The experiencer’s first hand accounts have expanded the body of death research, as well as our own ability to imagine death and dying. Collectively these experiences, as they become more common, are creating new worlds and consciousness.

Swoon responds to the architecture of the Library Street Collective galleries — two rooms connected by a narrow tunnel — to capture the sensory phenomena of near-death and empathetic death experience. The installation begins in the “vortex,” featuring halos of intricately cut paper framing block printed figures. After passing through a narrow hall with clusters of suspended papercut patterns, the second gallery opens into the “meadow,” a bright yellow room with familiar faces encircled within a lush landscape. The delicacy and brightness of the installation captures the overwhelming sense of transcendent joy and the all encompassing love that has been described in many people’s experiences of dying.

Curry describes the origin of The Light After in her own words:

“When my mother passed away in 2013, I was asleep at the time. I awoke inside a dream to see falling snow. The snow started to open up into blossoms of light as it passed through my body, and it carried with it my mother's voice. I woke up knowing that my mother had passed away, but I felt a little crazy for believing such a thing was possible. My sister called shortly after to confirm that my mom had indeed passed. In the years following this intensely strange and profound experience, I discovered through research that it was a rare but extant phenomenon called the ‘empathetic death experience.’”

Press

Andrew Salomone, “Street Artist Swoon Brings a Spiritual Installation to Detroit,” VICE, October 17, 2016.

Kristin Sancken, “Swoon Installation Breathes Life, and Death, Into Deserted Detroit Architecture,” artnet News, October 18, 2016.

Sarah Rose Sharp, “Glimpses of the Afterlife in Swoon’s New Installation,” Hyperallergic, November 3, 2016.

Priscilla Frank, “Artist Simulates What It’s Like To Have A Shared-Death Experience,” Huffington Post, October 11, 2016.

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY

April 11 - August 24, 2014

Curated by Sharon Matt Atkins

Submerged Motherlands addresses the loss of homeland within the context of the catastrophic effects of climate change and rising seas. The monumental installation was created for Brooklyn Museum’s rotunda gallery, featuring the 60-foot-tall Tree sculpture. Inspired by Axis Mundi, the tree that connects heaven and earth, the immense canopy of paper-cut branches and dyed-fabric roots provide safety to those who journey through the center of a storm. In the museum, three rafts find a safe haven nestled around the Tree’s roots. In this arrangement, Swoon creates a place of rest for the sculptural vessels that she built and navigated, five years earlier, down the Hudson river (Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, 2008) and across the Adriatic Sea (Swimming Cities of Serenissima, 2009).

In this installation, Curry links the concept of homeland to the body of the mother, our original homeland. Contemplating the losses endured along the Atlantic Coast during the recent aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, at the same time as she grieved the passing of her mother, Curry identified profound parallels between the environmental threats to home and safety posed by climate change, and the feeling of grief and loss that destabilizes concepts of family and home after losing a parent. Looking back in human history, Curry connects the dramatic environmental shifts we are experiencing now to the fate of Doggerland, a landmass that was once the most populated area of Europe, connecting the European continent to Great Britain, until it was destroyed by a tsunami 8,000 years ago. Through highlighting the interconnections between mythology, historical events and personal experience, Submerged Motherlands offers a mobile and shape-shifting vision of homeland, perpetually reinventing itself, to offer harborage, safety and rest within some of the most hostile conditions that currently threaten it.

Submerged Motherlands Artist Interview with Caledonia Curry.

Press

Kurt McVey, “Swoon’s Mother Lode,” Interview Magazine, April 10, 2014.

Leigh Silver, “Interview: Swoon Talks Her New Installation "Submerged Motherlands" at the Brooklyn Museum,” Complex, April 9, 2014.

Patricia Garcia, “Swoon's Street Art Takes Over the Brooklyn Museum of Art,” Vogue, April 9, 2014.

Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art, Brussels, Belgium

March 24 - August 28, 2016

The City Lights is a site-specific exhibition unfolding across the labyrinthine cellar galleries of the five-story museum. Curry responds to the maze-like architecture of the historic building with carefully placed portraits and papercuts that respond to the theatrical quality of the space, a human-scale version of a shadow box or toy theater. She addresses themes of passage and initiation, , making connections between the feelings of discovery that occur when exploring the physically subterranean, to the youthful experience of becoming aware of underground subcultures.

The City Lights was the inaugural exhibition of the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art, which also featured installations by MOMO, Maya Hayuk and Faile. As artists who primarily work on in the public sphere and on city streets, this group exemplified the museum’s founding mission to reach new publics through cutting edge contemporary art, called “culture 2.0.”

The City Lights Artist Interview with Caledonia Curry.

Wynwood Walls Art of Collaboration Program, Miami, FL

Opening Reception Dec 4 - 7, 2014

Dawn and Gemma is a public mural featuring a central image of a mother breast-feeding her child, flanked by mirrored Memento Mori portraits of Curry’s mother created shortly before her death. At 12 feet tall, Dawn and Gemma is one of Curry’s largest block prints. The mural celebrates intergenerational bonds and the cycle of life and death. Inspired by an encounter with a childhood friend while her mother was dying, Curry bore witness to Dawn’s deeply nurturing relationship with her children. Being present to this life-giving force gave Curry comfort at a time when she was grieving both the loss of her mother, and the effects of trauma and addiction on her childhood, which created obstacles to maintaining a nurturing relationship with her mother throughout her life. The revelation that motherhood could be so elementally nurturing was a powerful catalyst in Curry’s life and artistic practice, leading her to confront these themes and chart a path to healing through her work.

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico

July 5 - July 31, 2013

Curated by Pedro Alonzo

Memento Mori was a site-specific installation that included both an indoor installation in the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo’s historic, Spanish colonial building, as well as outdoor, clandestine art installations on the streets of Oaxaca. Curry created this installation as part of Hecho en Mexico, a major group exhibition curated by Pedro Alonzo (ICA Boston), that brought the most important international Street Artists to present their work to a Mexican audience.

The indoor installation responds to the architectural components of the gallery to create an altar-like installation centered around Memento Mori, a portrait of her mother created shortly after her death. The sacred, life-giving nature of blood is a central theme, represented by the deep red walls throughout the installation. The outdoor interventions take up similar themes of birth and death on the personal and global scale. These portraits include Kamayura, a young indigenous activist in Brazil who has protested the devastation to her ancestral land caused by the construction of the Belo Monte Dam; Street Sweeper, a portrait of a man cleaning the street in Mexico City; and Silvia Elena, a portrait of a woman who was killed in Juarez, Mexico, one of over 400 victims of femicide in Juarez alone in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Manatee-Sarasota Fine Art Gallery, State College of Florida, Brandenton, FL,

March 1 - April 3, 2013.

“Petrichor” is the scent of the first rain upon the earth after a long dry spell. Swoon’s Petrichor was made to celebrate the hidden worlds that become visible through the practice of looking and sensing deeply. Curry learned the importance of attunement from her father, who was an avid gardener. She attributes the time spent with him, carefully observing nature, as the genesis of her path to becoming an artist.

In the gallery, earthen-colored gallery walls are layered with paper cut patterns of natural motifs created from Curry’s own observations alongside block print portraits of friends and family. Two portraits of Curry’s father, Milton Curry Jr., who lived close to the college, are included in the exhibition. Elevating these everyday encounters highlight the importance of personal relationships, and the fluidity between art and life that recurs throughout Curry’s work.

Galerie LJ, Paris, France

November 30 - January 15, 2013

Motherlands is a site specific installation unfolding over two floors, taking on generational narratives of origin and death on both the personal and global scale. Created shortly after her own mother’s death in 2013, Motherlands is one of the first installations where Curry directly takes on her personal history. This interest would eventually develop into multi-year community engagement projects that address intergenerational trauma and addiction.

The installation begins in the upper gallery with bright, three-dimensional installations of her iconic block-print portraits. The cellar underneath the gallery, Curry responds to the , maze-like architecture of passageways, arches and caverns, to connect the interior experience of grief with the physical transition between life and death as a sacred passage. Memento Mori, a block print that features multiple images of her mother as a young woman, and shortly before her death, is suspended in one of the cellar archways, encircled by altar-like light. Created in the classical memento mori tradition, this piece serves as the anchor to the Motherlands exhibition, and a reminder of life’s impermanence.

SNOW Contemporary, Tokyo, Japan.

April 4 - May 20, 2012

Honeycomb is an contemplative installation that honors the sacred importance of the bee. In 2012, we were just beginning to hear about the effects of human-caused climate change on bees, who were dying in massive numbers. All life on earth depends on the work of bees as pollinators, and their loss has tremendous ecological impact. Honeycomb makes connections between the loss of bees and other, large-scale, environmental catastrophes, including the 2011 tsunami in Japan, that irrevocably alter the landscape and our relationships with it.

The installation is imagined as an altar-like space, providing comfort and solace in a time of mourning. The walls are painted gold and illuminated by candlelight. Flowing across the space are intricate block-print portraits linked by abstracted honeycomb motifs. In this space, Curry honors the beauty in all life, and the inseparable bonds between humans and nature.

Black Rat Projects, London, England,

December 1 - December 24, 2011

“Murmuration” refers to the flocking formation of starlings in flight. Working to capture the feeling of awe that reveals itself through careful observation of nature, Curry responds to the sweeping curves of a cavernous yet intimate former train tunnel. Sculptures appear to rise out of the floor and block-print portraits layered on found wood create mysterious nooks and passageways through the gallery. Embedded within are peepholes with miniature installations, evoking the sense of mystery and wonder that accompanies a peek into secret worlds and hidden terrains.

Swoon’s Murmuration features many of Curry’s most ambitious block prints, including three-dimensional versions of Thalassa, Mrs. Bennett and Ice Queen, which all stand over 12 feet tall. The translation of her portraits into sculptures is an approach she would return to throughout her work, developing the architectural relationships of her work in both her series of miniatures, as well as in the immersive environments she creates for stop-motion animation.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California

April 17, 2011 – August 8, 2011

Curated by Jeffrey Deitch, Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose

Art in the Streets is the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2011. Curated by MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch and Associate Curators Roger Gastman and Aaron Rose, the exhibition traces the development of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the global movement it has become today, concentrating on key cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Sao Paulo, where a unique visual language or attitude has evolved.

Swoon’s architectural-scale installation features a triptych portrait of the Ice Queen, Curry’s grandmother, atop a 20ft structure of fabric and intricately cut paper. In this portrait, Curry looks back with compassion and understanding on the conditions of duress that made it difficult to develop a relationship with her grandmother. This personal narrative merges with the sense of expansion and awe when one ventures out beyond the family and home, and into the world. Illuminated from within, Ice Queen projects patterned shadows on a cavern-like enclosure of draped textile forms. These were inspired by the shadows cast by Hickory, a raft that sailed with the Swimming Cities of Serenissima, as it passed under the bridges on the Grand Canal. Curry’s contribution highlights the influence of the city itself on her studio practice, which draws inspiration from architectural forms and the everyday people who make their mark on the cities they inhabit.

Curry’s Ice Queen installation is exhibited alongside works by 50 of the most important international graffiti and street artists. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive timeline illustrated with artwork, photos, video, and ephemera providing a historical context for the work, as well as a printed catalogue.

Deitch Studios, Long Island City, Queens

September 7–October 19, 2008

In the early evening on Sunday, September 7, 2008, seven handmade boats—or, more precisely, seven floating sculptures—docked in front of Deitch Studios on the East River in Long Island City. Their arrival at Deitch Studios was the final stop on a three-week journey down the Hudson River and around the tip of Manhattan. The seven boats, built by Swoon and her friends from scrap wood and other discarded materials, began their sail down the Hudson River on August 15 in Troy, New York, stopping along the way for musical and theatrical performances.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea was a two-part exhibition merging Swoon’s block print portraits, found objects of urban decay, and a floating sculptural city. One part of the exhibition was on the water, and the other was in the gallery. It honors the DIY ethic of self-built communities, their unique ability to create resilient adaptations to the way we live in response to climate change and rising seas. The rafts symbolize the continuity of safety and home even within precarity and adventure.

As the seven vessels docked in front of Deitch Studios, they were tethered by ropes to the skirts of a twenty-five-foot-high paper sculpture of two women embracing, the central image of the indoor portion of the show. The image of the Switchback Sisters came to Swoon in a dream in 2006, when she was worried about the rising waters while her first set of boats was floating down the Mississippi River. She envisioned a woman who would gather the boats into a safe haven under her skirts.

Swoon’s indoor installation, in the large cathedral-like space of Deitch Studios, was divided into two levels, above and below an imaginary flood line. She imagined that if the water of the East River were to rise, the rafts would float into the shelter of the embracing sculpture to whose skirts they were tethered. The imagery on the walls was drawn from the sea and from the mangrove swamps that the artist explored in her Florida youth. She was inspired by the way the trees in the mangrove swamps send out huge networks of roots, both below and above the water, creating two parallel ecosystems. Above the imaginary waterline, Swoon created the image of a city rising from the sea. The parallel narratives of the exhibition echoed the many parallel narratives that exist in our world, including for Curry, a convergence of her life on the river and her life as a street artist in New York.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea was the result of a year of design and construction and the combined efforts of seventy-five collaborators, working under Swoon’s direction. A crew of forty people sailed the seven boats down the Hudson. During the summer of 2006, Swoon and the Miss Rockaway Armada had launched a similar project on the Mississippi River, which had lasted for 2 years, and greatly influenced this endeavor. For the 2008 project, Swoon designed and supervised the construction of all the boats, imagining this iteration to be less an attempt at a communal traveling utopia, and more of a living sculptural performance.

Swoon’s collaborators on Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea included playwright Lisa D’Amour, circus composer Sxip Shirey, Kinetic Steam Works from San Francisco, and the band Dark Dark Dark. Performances took place as the boats docked during their journey down the Hudson River in August and in front of Deitch Studios during the second week of September.

Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea Artist Interview with Caledonia Curry.

New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles, California

February 16- April 19, 2008

Drown Your Boats was Curry’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition. The immersive installation was inspired by the Siren and the Crone, mythological representations of women that incite fear, as well as Angela Carter’s collection of short stories “Burning Your Boats,” which feature darkly feminist fiction about the destructive potential of desire.

Drown Your Boats transforms New Image Gallery with densely layered sculptural forms, created from reclaimed materials and found objects overlaid with block-print portraits originally pasted on city streets. It uses the DIY junk boat aesthetic developed by Curry and her collaborators while building their own vessels to navigate the Mississippi and Hudson rivers to manifest an underworld cityscape of the imagination. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a modified canoe that would eventually become part of the river-based performances during Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea.

Curry’s approach to materials combines the ornate grit of the punk culture she was part of with a resourcefulness that originates from deep concern for the ecological impact of materials and the desire to minimize waste. This exhibition brings together two threads that recur in her work about how our struggles for survival are interrelated: within the speculative frameworks of DIY culture, we see how our vision of collective living is inseparable from the environment we inhabit.

Deitch Projects, New York, NY

July 7 - August 13, 2005

In 2005, the Deitch Projects, founded by Jeffrey Deitch, presented Curry’s first New York solo exhibition: Swoon. The interior of the gallery was transformed into a cityscape populated by intricate cut out figures and block-prints set within sculptural elements referencing truss-work, power-lines and elevated trains. Drawing on Kowloon Walled City as the creative point of departure, Curry hoped to evoke the spontaneous, unregulated, and self built development that took place in the autonomous Hong Kong neighborhood before it was bulldozed in 1993. She connects the ingenuity and complexity of Kolwoon Walled City, across cultures, to other built environments that arise from necessity. These include the portraits Curry captures from life as it is lived in public, on the streets of New York City. This early exhibition introduces many of the themes that will recur throughout her work, including her focus on urban architecture, activism and liberation movements.

At the opening, guests were greeted by the surprise arrival of the band Japanther, which played from the back of a Penske box-truck to a street crowded with over 1,000 people. Swoon was seen crowd-surfing down Grand Street, a moment which encapsulates the youth-driven energy behind the Street Art movement in the early 2000s, and its fluidity with music and pop culture. Curry discusses this experience in a documentary film by Fredric King, Swoon: fearless (2017).

Watch the Documentary Swoon: fearless, by Frederic King