Cicada, Swoon’s first major stop-motion animation, is a meditation and celebration of emergence, growth, and transformation. Her personal story acts as a central narrative, but it is infused with elements drawn from classical mythology. Recurring motifs of this exhibition such as birth, divination, endurance, suffering, strength, and healing interweave and unfold throughout the film. Here, the corporeal body serves as a vessel carrying memories and traditions. A house, a ship, and human figures split open to liberate a cast of imaginative and mythological creatures. The central figure is the “Tarantula Mother,” a half-human, half-spider allegory that evokes harrowingmemories from Swoon’s childhood. The legacy of her parents’ addiction and substance abuse adds a strong element of realism to the film, grounding its otherwise-whimsical atmosphere. As an insect, the cicada is notable for spending much of its life underground, only emerging into adulthood after thirteen to seventeen years. In Cicada the artist expresses a similar ability, one shared by all of us, to molt and burst through one’s former self in a cycle of self-realization and self-healing. Surrounded by new sculptures and her portrait series, Cicada encourages us to immerse ourselves into Swoon’s world, embracinga vivid experience embedded in the present moment.
- Aaron Ott from the screening of Cicada at the Albright-Knox, "Seven Contemplations"
Hecate Skecate, Stop motion animation by Swoon with sound by Brian Bo, 2018
Unstruck, Stop motion animation by Swoon with sound by Brian Bo, 2018
Sofia and Storm, Stop motion animation by Swoon, sounds by Brian Bo
Meditation, Spin - Stop motion animation by Swoon with sound by Brian Bo, 2018
Sibyl and Cosmos, Stop Motion animation by Swoon with music by Brian Bo
As a roving, mobile sculpture, The House Our Families Built asks viewers to consider the legacy of ancestral histories - whether through traditions, trauma, or repeated narratives - and the ways in which they inform how we understand and talk about ourselves.
Collaboration with PBS American Portrait.
The Road Home is a multi-disciplinary project that merges arts therapy, public art and community advocacy to heal the traumatic roots of addiction in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.
This project began close to home. Curry grew up in a family where her parents struggled with addiction. As a young adult, her home life was always on the brink of crisis. Despite the instability of her early childhood, after she moved to New York for college, she forged a path where she gained success and recognition as an artist. She believed she had overcome her circumstances and her past was behind her. In 2011, Curry’s perspective changed when she read the work of Gabor Maté. After years of working on Vancouver’s skid row, Maté observed that addiction is an attempt to soothe the pain of a nervous system that has been disrupted by a history of trauma: it is a desperate attempt to find relief. The compassion he expressed for the deep pain at the root of addiction is a perspective that moved Curry to her core, enabling her to embark on her own healing journey where she recognized the trauma she still carried with her and found forgiveness for her family members.
The Road Home moves outward from the personal to address the widespread community impact of opioid addiction. It draws on creative tools to change the pervasive cultural stigma that prevents people in addiction from accessing the support they need, and creates bias amongst policy-makers that influences how they implement programs and laws that address opioid addiction.
The Road Home had three main components. The first was a series of daily, drop-in art therapy workshops at the Kensington Storefront community center. Curry worked with collaborators Jessica Radovich, Heather Box, and Julian Mocine-Mcqueen to create workshop activities that included storytelling, song circles and drawing exercises. The second outcome was a public mural, Healing Begins With Connection, located on Kensington Avenue directly across from Prevention Point, a center that provides social and medical services to people experiencing homelessness and addiction. Curry designed the mural entirely with portraits of the participants we worked with during our arts workshops, set across a colorful, patterned backdrop. The third outcome was a series of education and advocacy events that included a public conference at the University of Pennsylvania, and a private workshop with the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services.
At the center of this project was care for the people most affected by addiction. The community engagement work brought affirmation into the daily lives of the people at Kensington Storefront, both through their face-to-face interactions with project collaborators, and in the landscape around them. Through designing a response that makes an impact on the individual, the community, and the public policy levels, The Road Home aims to leverage creative expression to change our cultural understanding of the links between trauma and addiction.
The Road Home Conference — Telling Our Stories
Photographs courtesy Steve Weinik and Caledonia Curry
Five Stories is multi-platform collaborative project which wove together art therapy, storytelling and public murals as a means to address the cyclical nature of unhealed trauma. Participants worked with Curry, therapist and yoga instructor Jessica Radovich, and storytelling coach Heather Box of The Million Person Project in a month-long art therapy and personal storytelling course that took place inside Graterford State Correctional Institution (SCI), at the Interim House treatment center, and with Philadelphia Mural Arts Guild, a prison-to-community reentry program. The classes addressed the relationship between trauma, loss, and addiction. Five Stories culminated in a two-hour public presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Coached by Box, each participant, including Curry, Radovich, and Box herself, told a story of self, work, and transformation.
In addition to the storytelling component, Curry created several portraits of those who have participated in the project. These were wheat-pasted in her signature style in public spaces throughout Philadelphia. The installations debuted as part of Open Source Philadelphia, a major public art exhibition organized by Philadelphia Mural Arts and guest curator Pedro Alonzo.
Collaborators:
Philadelphia Mural Arts
Graterford Penitentiary Art Program
Jessica Radovich
Heather Box
Five Stories Artist Interview with Caledonia Curry
Press:
Alexandra Hammond, “CALEDONIA CURRY Five Stories with SWOON,” The Brooklyn Rail, November, 2015.
Images courtesy of Caledonia Curry
Konbit Shelter began as a response to the devastating earthquake that shook Haiti in 2010. As the world grappled with how to respond, a small group of artists, engineers, architects and builders realized that we had spent the last decade developing a skill set which might be of use. We had been employing creative problem solving skills to build unlikely structures in uncertain and difficult circumstances, and we asked ourselves how what we had learned could be of service to the community rebuilding efforts that would be needed following the quake.
We assembled a team and connected with the community of Komye, a rural village situated about 15 miles from the quake’s epicenter.
Our first effort together was to adopt the incredibly resilient earth-bag dome style of architecture developed by Nadir Khalili, and to construct a three room community center.
Why start with a community center when people are in need of homes? The problems on the table were these - how to rebuild without repeating the mistakes that had lead the quake to be so devastating, how to face the challenges created by the extremely high price and low quality of available building materials, and how to answer these problems in new ways, while also creating structures that people were comfortable with and felt good about. When we posed these questions, the answer that can back was unanimous - build a community structure first. Build something that everyone can create together, have ownership of together, and decide from there what’s working and what feels good to live in.
The construction of the community center cemented a bond that would continue for almost a decade and counting. Along the way, we found that the creation of meaningful, well paid work did as much to help people rebuild their lives as any structure ever could.
In the following years we created 3 homes, as well as supporting an arts after-school program and and English club which meet weekly in the community center.
Kaye Monique :
The first home was built almost immediately following the community center, and Monique La Pierre, a woman who had recently given birth while living in a tarp structure was chosen by the community to be its recipient. This home is built using the same earth-bag style as the community center. Kaye Monique’s is a 1.5 bedroom house with a an additional interior loft space, a wood frame front porch, and double chambered composting toilet behind the house.
Kaye Adelia:
After the initial momentum of reconstruction began to slow, we took some time to gather feedback from the community. What was working about the new structures, and what wasn’t? We found that despite the super-adobe dome’s inherent strength and reliance on very little cement, the plaster’s exposure to tropical weather, combined with the high price of cement in Haiti meant that the usual maintenance required by natural building techniques was prohibitively expensive for the average Haitian salary. The next home was adapted to keep the natural disaster resilience offered by the earth-bag technique while scaling back the structure and protecting it with a metal roof.
Kay Louisanna:
Continuing to adapt with feedback from folks in Komye, an idea arose to construct a home with bamboo. Komye is a farming community, and bamboo is a crop that can be grown locally, supplying building material while also helping with erosion in the hillsides. A collaboration was started with architect Joanna Torres of Oficina Design, and the final home of the Konbit Shelter project was constructed in 2017. Louisanna’s home may be the most expansive, containing 4 sleep/live spaces and an outdoor kitchen.
Klub Obzevetwa:
In 2014 the Konbit Shelter project took a listening year, pausing our construction work, but staying connected with Komye through the activation of the community center. We partnered with Guilds, a group specializing in play-based education, and Klub Obzevetwa was born. The club meets weekly to give Komye kids time to develop their creativity with the help of local teachers.
Klub Angle:
In 2018 folks in Komye made a simple request - help us start a weekly English class so that we can hone our English skills to further our education and job opportunities. Klub Angle was launched in February 2019 with help from team member Stan Kniss.
What’s next?
January of 2020 will mark 10 years since the earthquake, and the beginning of Haiti’s long road of recovery. We will spend the remainder of 2019 dialing in the details on each of the structures to make sure that they are fit to be maintained by resident of Komye for years to come.
In January we will turn over the care and maintenance of the structures to the community, participate in a resilience and healing celebration, and formally complete Konbit Shelter’s work in Haiti.
Klub Obzevetwa and Klub Angle will continue.
Konbit is a Haitian Creole word for a traditional form of cooperative communal labor, whereby the able-bodied folk of a locality help each other prepare their fields. It refers to a form of solidarity and neighborly cooperation in the face of adversity. Konbit Shelter references this word with a global interpretation, as people from all over the world coming together after the earthquake to work in solidarity with our neighbors in Haiti.
Photographs courtesy Tod Seelie, David Sundberg, Olivia Katz, Ben Wolf, Caledonia Curry
Konbit Shelter is a project that has been created with many hands and much support.
Special Thanks:
Team 2010-2020:
Caledonia Curry
KT Tierney
Ben Wolf
Joanna Torres
Tânia Teixeira
Dana Vincent
Shamil Lilani
Tod Seelie
Nkoula Badilla
Olivia Katz
James Cross
iris Steven Lasson
Stan Kniss
Fritz Pierre Louis
Frederic King
Suzy Lafferty
Bryan Ortega Welch
Michael Joceyline Aristil
Mike O'toole
Alyssa Dennis
Chad Lasson
Craig Maldonado
Robinson Michelot
Veronia Giraldo
Octavio Lopez
Sponsors:
Guyaki
Dr. Bronners
Creative Time Global Residency Award
Upper Playground
Singing for Change Foundation
In 2007, Swoon and a group of friends were invited to purchase and restore an abandoned church in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Over the next 10 years, Swoon participated in a number of projects that focused on rehabilitating the structure in a way that would also engage and benefit the immediate surrounding community. These efforts included collaborating with local artist collective Transformazium on a deconstruction (as an alternative to demolition) initiative for fire-damaged sections of the building, creating a Super Adobe dome in the building’s disused parking lot, and, finally, the creation of Braddock Tiles.
Braddock Tiles began with the intention of restoring the roof of the church entirely from handmade artisanal tiles that would be created in a ceramics workshop in the basement of the church. This was conceived as a way to create well-paid jobs locally, fostering community reinvestment that would address the economic devastation caused by the closure of the manufacturing sector in Braddock.
In 2015, the scope of the project shifted in response to the large scale of resources needed to carry out the renovations needed to restore the church. Choosing to focus on the community building aspect of the project, Braddock Tiles began to work with an existing organization, the Braddock Youth Program, to create a job-readiness and soft skills program for youth ages 18- to 26-years-old, who had aged out of the youth program. The program was held in the Bathhouse Ceramics Studio, located within the historic Braddock Carnegie Library.
The Braddock Tiles ran from 2015-2018, and was developed collaboratively by Curry, KT Tierny and Katie Johnson. The program directed the resources collected through their fundraising efforts to paid apprenticeships that would teach local youth ceramic fabrication and leadership skills, as well as host field trips and workshops to foster re-interpretation of local history and youth-led projects that included creating decorative murals for their community.
Curry and the Heliotrope Foundation are currently working to pass the care of the building into new hands. Curry has spoken publicly about the significance of this decision, and the importance of recognizing one’s own limitations.
Braddock Tiles: The Impact of Making, mini-documentary by Frederic King.
TedX Talk “Finding Our Own Good Limitations” with Caledonia Curry.
Press
Photographs courtesy Tod Seelie, January Fredericks, and Caledonia Curry.
The Music Box was the first iteration of Music Box Village, an immersive, experimental, fully playable musical environment originally built on the site of a collapsed shotgun house on Piety Street in New Orleans. In 2011, Swoon, with co-founding members Jay Pennington, Taylor Shepard and Delaney Martin, developed the concept of musical architecture and invited 25 artists to create site-specific installations that would become the initial prototype and sound laboratory. The project began five years after Hurricane Katrina, in response to the long-term struggle towards recovery that continued to impact the livelihood of residents and the distinct musical culture of the city. Curry’s intention was to cultivate a space for collective play to support the process of healing from disaster. She says "I hope it represents this very basic need in people to rebuild joyfully and with imagination."
On Oct 22, 2011, The Music Box hosted its debut performance. Over the 9-month initial run, The Music Box received local and national attention, and began to sell out performances, with lines wrapping around the block. The project served over 15,000 guests and hosted over 70 New Orleans-based and international musicians. Originally supported through Kickstarter campaigns and private art sales from the Swoon Studio, Music Box Village eventually branched off as its own artist-led non-profit organization and is currently the flagship project of New Orleans Airlift. Its mission is to collaborate to inspire wonder, connect communities, and foster opportunities through arts education and the creation of experimental public artworks
Press
Emily Nathan, “Swoon: SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS,” artnet News, October 22, 2011.
Photographs courtesy Tod Seelie, Bryan Welch, Caledonia Curry (and others to be listed).
Swimming Cities of Serenissima was a fleet of sculptural junk rafts that crashed the 2009 Venice Biennale. The project was the last in a series of river-based projects founded or led by Swoon, which included Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea (2008) on the Hudson River, and the Miss Rockaway Armada (2006-2007) on the Mississippi River. Curry cites multiple sources of inspiration for Serenissima, including a brief time living on a sailboat in the Netherlands, Viking boats, and the impact of her first visit to Venice where she was struck by the conversation between the water and architecture. She also credits the experience of the Miss Rockaway Armada for leading her to explore the possibilities of floating sculptures as a way to live and travel, while also building the knowledge and community necessary to attempt the complicated logistics of navigating rafts through the Ventian lagoon.
After her solo exhibition at Deitch Studios, Swoon deconstructed the rafts into shipping containers, which were sent overseas to Koper, Slovenia. The containers were initially held in customs because they were thought to be trash, until Swoon could provide documents that proved they were art. A crew of 30 collaborators worked at a marina in Koper until the rafts received approval by the Slovenian coast guard to leave port. A fleet of three rafts, named Maria, Alice and Hickory navigated in small jaunts into open waters along the shore of the Adriatic Sea, before moving into the protected in-land Littoral canals of Italy.
Swimming Cities of Serenissima entered the Venetian Lagoon in May 2009. The raft’s crew developed a collaborative performance lead by Ben Burke, Adina Bier and the band Dark, Dark, Dark, that was staged onboard the vessels and performed to audiences on shore over the course of three weeks. The final performance was an illegal procession down the Grand Canal that began late at night, and ended as the sun rose. Serenissima’s last performance, as well as their journey across the Adriatic, was recorded in a documentary film by Paul Poet, Empire Me: New Worlds are Happening! (2011).
Although Swoon was not officially invited to the Biennale, Serenissma was lauded by the critic Jerry Saltz as the most moving moment of that years’ festival. He said, “Like the best work here, Swoon’s work doesn’t come out of academic critique; it comes from necessity and vision. These are the perfect tools for making things as old as time new again — including an art world turned dangerously into itself.”
Swimming Cities of Serenissima, Excerpt from Empire Me, by Paul Poet
Press:
Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Barging In to Venice,” New York Magazine, June 5, 2009.
Jerry Saltz, “Entropy in Venice,” artnet News, June 29, 2009.
All images courtesy of Tod Seelie.
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.
The Miss Rockaway Armada, was a collectively realized semi-utopian experiment in communal living and home-made raft navigation that travelled down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to St. Louis during two summers in 2006 and 2007. Swoon was one of several New York City-based artists that founded the initial concept, and who was instrumental in raising funds and other resources for its execution; however the project was led using a co-operative model that had as many as 70 rolling members over two years.
Swoon cites her inspiration for the Miss Rockaway Armada on the Floating Neutrinos, a group of artists led by Poppa Neutrino, who lived communally on the water and successfully completed a trans-atlantic crossing on a hand-made junk raft in 1998; as well as a long tradition of punk boat culture in the city of Minneapolis.
The Miss Rockaway Armada was partially constructed in the Emergency Arts cooperative in Chelsea, before being transported to Minneapolis. They were designed using two VW diesel rabbit car engines that were modified to run long-arm boat propellers. The first version of the rafts included three twenty-foot long interconnected structures, pulling several tows, which made it nearly 110 feet long.
The rafts pushed off at White Sands in 2006, and performed musical variety shows and arts workshops in the towns along the river. The project dry-docked at a restaurant and biker-bar called Ducky’s Lagoon in the Quad Cities when the weather became too cold to continue. In 2007, the rafts were reconfigured into smaller vessels, and included new members who joined and built new rafts. The flotilla travelled south to St. Louis, where they made an emergency landing and were hosted on Bob Cassilly’s “Cement Land”, the founder of the City Museum of St. Louis, after river conditions became too dangerous to navigate.
The river-navigation portion of the project ended in St. Louis; however, members of the Miss Rockaway Armada collective continued to create collaborative art installations nationally and internationally through 2011. These included installations in the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, MassMOCA, two mural commissions with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and a major installation and series of public works at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, funded by grants from the PEW Center for Art and Heritage.
Press
David Carr, “Arts, Briefly; Mississippi Armada Passes Muster.” New York Times, August 16, 2006.
Photographs courtesy Todd Seelie, Caledonia Curry, Tomiko Jones, Todd Chandler, and Ayen Tran.
