Swoon

Caledonia Curry (born 1977), whose work appears under the name Swoon, is an American contemporary artist who works with printmaking, sculpture, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition. Her work centers the transformative capacity of art as a catalyst for healing within communities experiencing crisis. Early life and education Caledonia Curry was born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. Both of her parents struggled with opioid addiction. At the age of 10, her mother enrolled her in art classes for retirees. Curry said, "the 80-year-old retired painters adopted me, they taught me how to paint. I’ve [become] a focused, confident artist because of them." At nineteen, she moved to the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York to study painting at the Pratt Institute, which she attended from 1998 to 2001. She received a classical Western education in both technique and career trajectory, which she viewed as too limited. She said “they’d tell me this is how you paint, these are the galleries that you will work with, and this is how your life is going to be.”