Swoon – Yaya 6

$2,500

SKU: 26656

Artwork Description

Swoon – Yaya 6

Dimensions: 13 x 5″
Year: 2016
Medium: silkscreen, gouache, and cut paper on wood

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.

In a moment when contemporary art often holds a conflicted relationship to beauty, Callie’s work carries with it an earnestness, treating the beautiful as sublime even as she explores the darker sides of her subjects. Her work has become known for marrying the whimsical to the grounded, often weaving in slivers of fairy-tales, scraps of myth, and a recurring motif of the sacred feminine. Tendrils of her own family history—and a legacy of her parents’ struggles with addiction and substance abuse—recur throughout her work.

While much of Callie’s art plays with the fantastical, there is also a strong element of realism. This can be seen in her myriad social endeavors, including a long-term community revitalization project in Braddock, Pennsylvania and her efforts to build earthquake-resistant homes in Haiti through Konbit Shelter. Her non-profit, the Heliotrope Foundation, was created in order to further support these ventures.

Today, Callie’s work can be found on the sides of buildings worldwide and has been given both permanent and transient homes in more classical institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Tate Modern, and the São Paulo Museum of Art. Most recently, she has begun using film animation to explore the boundaries of visual storytelling.

Yaya came into Swoon’s life through her work with Mural Arts’ Restorative Justice program. In collaboration with Jessica Radovich, a mental health counselor and yoga instructor, Swoon developed a series of classes that help address trauma related to addiction and loss. From this experience, she developed a series of portraits installed in public spaces, including Yaya. Yaya is a friend of a friend and fellow artist. She’s says of her subject, “I first met Yaya when he was serving a life sentence in Graterford Penitentiary for a crime that he committed when he was a teenager, who was self-medicating a lifetime of drama with drugs and who was in the grips of a PTSD flashback. At the time I met him, he was now nearly 50, and he’d read and could quote from every book imaginable. He was this incredible artist and also a really compassionate leader to his fellow inmates.”