e’re all big fans of Swoon (aka Caledonia Curry), a diverse street artist known for her life-size paste-ups, paper cutouts, and crazy boat-based performance projects. As her longtime proponent Jeffrey Deitch explains in the introduction to her new monograph, Swoon’s first street art project was a series of block prints on tracing paper that she put up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. While that didn’t go so well (according to her at least), it opened the door to more outdoor work; soon she was putting up her hand-painted stickers on news boxes and covering the billboards around Pratt Institute with her paintings. “There was a sensitivity in the rendering of the figure that I was astonished to see on the street,” says Deitch. “It was some of the freshest work I had seen outside in the city since the early 1980s.” This first monograph on the street artist Swoon is a crash course on the incredible range of her diverse artistic practices. Filled with brilliant color photographs, the book brings reader to streets around the world to see her life-size prints and paper cutouts that transform as natural elements slowly erode and destroy them. It travels across the waters to include striking images from her most recent projects, Swimming Cities, which show a team of volunteer craftsmen scavenging junk to create makeshift steamships that are part floating artwork, part performance, and part experiments in communal living. And it brings readers inside her art collective, Toyshop, which orchestrates organic public theater that includes everything from street parties to public demonstrations. Woven together seamlessly, and accompanied by essays from fellow artists and famed gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, this book showcases the work of one of the art world’s brightest stars. SWOON has been creating street art in New York City since 1999. She studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and has traveled internationally to create exhibits and host workshops. Her work can be seen at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Tate Modern, or on the streets of Brooklyn. Jeffrey Deitch is the owner of Deitch Projects in Brooklyn.
www.justseeds.org/artists/swoon/
www.deitch.com
