SWOON, Caledonia Dance Curry (born 1978) is a street artist who specializes in life-size wheatpaste prints and paper cutouts of human figures. Swoon started making street art in 1999 after studying at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and in 2005 started large-scale installations.
Swoon often pastes her work depicting people, frequently of friends and family on the streets around the world. These works are usually located in uninhabited locations including abandoned buildings, bridges, fire escapes and water towers to name a few.
The majority of Swoon’s street art consist of portraits. She believes we store things in our body and that a portrait can become an x-ray of those experiences. She wants her portraits to capture something in the subject. She tries to document something she loves about the subject and has seen in him or her as a way to connect. By putting the portraits on the streets she is allowing for others to witness this connection and make their own.
Her work is inspired by both art historical and folk sources, ranging from German expressionists wood block prints to Indonesian shadow puppets. Living in New York City has also had a great impact on the artist. She loved its graffiti, its layers and others’ feelings towards the city. She wanted to interact with the layers of the city, what she describes as, “the naturally occurring collage of the city.”
Swoon was born in Connecticut and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. Lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.