Caledonia Curry
Known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork.Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists.
Her recent work has been focused on the relationship of trauma and addiction. Through community partnerships that center compassion and the transformative power of art, Curry draws on her personal history growing up in an opioid addicted family as a catalyst for connection and healing. Over the past 10 years, she has founded and developed collaborative multi-year projects in Braddock and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Komye, Haiti, that address crises ranging from natural disasters to the opioid epidemic.
She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film.
Testimonial
“There’s something about the air and the light out there, in Boulder, and at Swoon Art House.
I asked the architect how they had made those gorgeous curved I-beam ceilings, and he told a story of the one place in the country that bends steel this way – how it takes three days without pause for each beam. Rebecca said how important it was to her, when designing the space, to keep the high ceilings open through the creation of those curved beams. In my time at Swoon House I understood why. It’s the kind of space that thoughts and feelings can expand into. Dreaming feels deeply welcome.
On my second night in residence, as I dug in to my writing, I was hit with a long forgotten memory. In the spacious peace of that light and air, in the stillness that surrounds the house, all of the long shoved down emotions that I needed to feel came rushing up. I cried, I wrote, I snuggled into the various beds and couches and corners of the space and wrote some more. I let the largeness of my task enter that big room and stay. I was away from my life and ready to take this on. There’s always a certain amount of fear when we square off so fully with a project. And yet this is what I needed.
Luckily this wasn’t all though. I wasn’t squaring off alone. Rebecca and the Scintilla team created an amazing dinner and story night for me to share some of what I was creating, and through it I got to have an incredibly warm, supportive, attentive set of eyes and ears in the middle of the process, which helped lend me the courage to keep going. They introduced me to an audience in Boulder and in Denver and through that I got to feel the beautiful creative enthusiasm of their arts community.
It’s a truly special place because it’s built by artists for artists, brick by brick (and mud layer by lud layer), and that spirit runs through every part.”