Artwork Description
Swoon – Moni and the Sphinx 1
Dimensions: 84 x 76″
Year: 2016
Medium: block print, coffee stain and gouache
on mylar
Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is a Brooklyn-based artist and is widely known as the first woman to gain large-scale recognition in the male-dominated world of street art. Callie took to the streets of New York while attending the Pratt Institute of Art in 1999, pasting her paper portraits to the sides of buildings with the goal of making art and the public space of the city more accessible.
With Moni and the Sphinx, Swoon created a mythologized portrait of one of her central collaborators and muses, fellow artist Monica Canilao. Swoon says of the work, “Wisdom, boundaries, the fecundity, and ferocity of nature are all being thought out within the forms in her dress. She’s emerging from, or is balanced on, a series of eggs and earths, rooting trees and river beds. There’s a sense of lightning coming from her fingers, which I let emerge organically out of the drawing because Monica is someone whose creativity seems to flow from her fingertips as naturally as spider’s silk and as spontaneously as lightning.”