We need to have elements of beauty and we need to have elements of joy and wonderment. I love to witness it. “This is the first time I’ve dropped off a model and left,” she fretted. You will receive a new password via e-mail. In her studio are precise scale models for the rafts, which are officially registered watercraft. What inspired you when you were a kid to start painting? “It was also,” Ms. Atkins said, “the first time an artist has used a fire extinguisher to paint our walls.”, Swoon employed a small army of friends as installers. IC: Do you have any solo projects coming up we should look out for? So one thing to explain it—the pieces had a certain logic to me—but really truly, those moments are experiential. We started with this house that was collapsing and we were making this musical sculpture with it, and then it fell down. There’s so many. Her reach expands from decaying warehouses to the permanent collections at prestigious museums to collective third-world art projects rooted in activism. Her ambitious body of work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern, among many others. But I think it was really more about just wanting to define myself and my own rights. We started with this house that was collapsing and we were making this kind of musical sculpture with the house and then it fell down and then we took the pieces and rebuilt it into these kind of small musical structures. “It brings about a kind of innocence, and I love that. At first I really wanted to make linoleum blocks but I couldn’t afford linoleum that size—I was waitressing in the city. The New York-based artist talks to us about her unique style of work and takes us along to see her paste a piece up in London “One is just another long-term relationship with the community that started around rebuilding after this disaster, and that developed into a relationship with this place where we’re working with the kids, we’re working with the adults, we’re building structures, and also, we’re building relationships.” The third project is in New Orleans and began after Katrina. Our site uses cookies. So it’s been a crazy 2 years. “I still love all of the stories that get related to me about what different pieces mean to people, and how it affects the neighborhood and how they feel about the decay and passing of each piece.”. It was started after Katrina but a few years after. S: That’s a project right outside of Pittsburgh, where we’re working on an abandoned church and turning it into an arts and learning center for that community of North Braddock. Swoon packed up her wheat-pasting gear, and rode off. Swoon, center, in New Orleans with Jonn Hankins, left, the president of the New Orleans Master Crafts Guild, and Darryl A. Reeves, a local blacksmith. h�bbd``b`�$N�- ��H�>Is@b} �jk�� q��X� V�� $�#�;���'AJ.�^�-�`-�k�V��e`$�����+@� ��S In New Orleans, Swoon helped create a shantytown where each house is a musical instrument. One of them is just—try to imagine that you have built something with your own hands and you’re navigating it in the sea. | Site Links: About | Contact | Media Kit | Press | Store | Careers | Subscribe | Terms & Conditions | RSS Feed. The second project is in Haiti. “When I was a kid, and I was like, ‘I want to be an artist,’ I had all these dreams and all these thoughts: ‘What’s it going to be like, and what am I going to make?’ ” she said. The foundation has already built a community center and several homes, which they’ve constructed with assistance from local farmers (one of the homes, underway currently, is fashioned entirely from bamboo). I appreciate the intuitive nature of it. Their deaths really brought me to a place of looking more deeply at how—just how people become addicted, and what kinds of trauma are forming them in those instances. It was one of those things where a few years later, after we had gone to Venice, after we had put them in storage for a while and sort of packed them up and said ‘okay maybe these will become something again one day.’. “It just feels like the spine of my work,” she said. IC: I know you use a lot of scavenged and found materials for your works. In high school, she started selling her paintings and ceramics — to her teachers. When I first started working on the raft so much of what I was thinking about—with those images of these floating cities—was rising seas and climate change and the instability of cities built along the coast, and just the place that we’re in right now ecologically. And then as far as Modern Artists—I mean there’s so many. You work with a lot of different elements within your installations. IC: You felt that you could connect to the city in a cultural way by doing that, that you could have some sort of impact? Meanwhile, her socially minded work has focused on building cultural hubs for far-flung artistically welcoming communities. h�b```c``�����0��A��X�����`� ����{�` `g`�� Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz, newly minted Swoon collectors, came to the opening. Copyright © 2020 THE UNTITLED MAGAZINE. S: I just wanted to make something that felt like it was part of my city. Swoon employs six people in her studio, and many more for projects. The Brooklyn Museum has done solo shows for Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, but hers was the first devoted to a living street artist, let alone a woman who rooted her career in Brooklyn. Yet Swoon has managed to circumvent the obstacles of her profession’s illegality by way of her rapid ascension to fame and subsequent decision to work exclusively on commission. With a glowing paper cutout pinned over her heart, the artist known as Swoon led a procession through the Brooklyn Museum early one summer night to her installation “Submerged Motherlands,” a site-specific jumble that includes two cantilevered rafts, seemingly cobbled out of junk; a tree, of fabric and wire, that reaches to the rotunda; and nooks of stenciled portraits. I’m talking with those guys about putting something together, which would definitely be more along the lines of a solo show. Growing up in Daytona Beach, Fla., known to friends and family as Callie, Swoon long considered herself the scrappy sort. “I really have to fight to keep personal time for drawing,” she said. Swoon and her compatriots used rafts to sail on the Hudson River and, in an art world coup, into the Venice Biennale in 2009. SWOON: ARTIST AS ACTIVIST GRADE LEVEL: 6-12 This lesson can be adapted for various grade levels OBJECTIVE Inspired by Swoon’s artwork, the students will design a stencil based on a cause they care about. Are there any particular artists that really resonated with you? Nobody, Swoon and her collaborators said, wants to be the first family with the exotic house. I’m working with a group down there called New Orleans Airlift. Her intricate paper-cut portraits and cityscapes, often affixed to walls in hardscrabble places, are meant to disintegrate in place, a refrain to the life around them. IC: You were one of the few female street artists in the early days and I understand you didn’t actually tag your work or really express your gender in your early work. I was a kid from this little town in Florida and you know those places are public and they’re open and I think that I sat a little bit uneasily within that context and within the art world. I think that when I was very young, I wasn’t really relating to their work as much. All Rights Reserved. That meant many consultations with architects and engineers to figure out how to support the tree and display the rafts. And then it was like ‘How do I make something not just for people who feel they are invited into a museum space?’ Because not everybody feels that way. As much as we say ‘oh yeah the previous generations set the tone of feminism and paved the way,’ I personally think strongly that there’s so much work that needs to be done. It always had been but looking at her work, The City of Joy, and listening to her talks and listening to her perspective became super important to me in this process. IC: I think its great the way you use so many different elements—performance art, street art, sculpture and collaborative art; everything comes together in a very beautiful way. Can you tell me how you source those elements? 24 0 obj <> endobj S: I think that probably at the times that I said that I was sort of doing the thing that I described where you’re a very young woman and you don’t want to be pigeon-holed into the generation of feminists that came before because they’re the generation before you; they did all this work so that you could be who you are instead of being who they were. Swoon made history with the project, becoming the first living street artist ever to be exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. In 2009, Swoon executed her visionary performance art project Swimming Cities of Serenissima — a massive “floating metropolis” that she constructed out of found materials and foraged junk which she then transformed into a series of seven rafts, and on which she and thirty of her friends floated into the Venice Biennale, figuratively and literally “crashing” the city’s esteemed annual art festival.
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