Hasta La Ideas

“Swoon,” the new eponymous book by the artist (aka Caledonia Curry and one of the best known female street artists in the world), finally came out this month. Tracing her process and showing some of her installations in galleries and streets around the world, as well as her larger scale community projects, including the street art collective Toyshop, the monograph includes essays by Curry herself, critic Carlo McCormick and others explaining her role as an instigator in the art world.

Callie recently talked to CH about her experience making the book, “it was amazing and sort of did my head in to try and encapsulate my whole life in art making over the last ten years—and this is me giving it my best shot. And almost none of that book would exist without the constant and beautiful vision of Tod Seelie.”

In as much as Swoon is an artist, she’s also an organizer, a hub and conduit for making things—wild things—happen. The book shows how Swoon goes about making her prints and ethereal cut-outs, as well as her Flotillas projects, like The Miss Rockaway Armada. For the project, handmade rafts sailed down the Mississippi, “Swimming Cities of Serenissima” took place in 2006 and 2007, and the rafts crossed the Adriatic and appeared in Venice for the biennale in 2009.

The book also highlights some of her other projects, including “Portrait of Silvia Elena” memorializing one of the first victims of the widespread killings of young women in Juárez, Mexico, where she researched the grisly phenomenon. A brief film describes her approach to making the work.

One essay mentions that Swoon doesn’t sleep much, a fact that makes sense given her cohesively broad and prolific output over the past few years.

“Swoon” sells from Abrams Books or Amazon.