Artwork Description
Swoon – Miss Rockaway
Dimensions: 60 x 51″
Year: 2022
Medium: cut paper on found table top
Swoon is widely regarded as the most influential street artist. Her wheat-pasted portraits of everyday people appear on building walls throughout the world, from Hong Kong to Haiti. Most of her street contemporaries, like JR and Banksy, are men. Swoon was the first female street artist to break through in a major way, and inspired a new generation of women artists. Swoon broke through generational trauma, as well, and her sensitive portraits of people she met along the way deliver a potent, and deeply humane standard. Her work is the subject of an upcoming international retrospective, and is shown in museums worldwide.
The skeletal siren of Miss Rockaway came out of a 2006 project in which Swoon and a few dozen collaborators, travelers, builders, artists, activists, and maritime hacks cobbled together a 110 foot long armada of rafts on the Mississippi. They lived on these rafts navigating the river, starting with its headwaters north of Minneapolis. During this experience, the image of Miss Rockaway became a mascot for the raft’s journey and an exploration of the relationship between humans and our waterways.