page_title: Swoon (artist)
section_title: Early life, education, and career
hierarchical_section_title: Swoon (artist) / Early life, education, and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Djerba Er Riadh Street Art
context_page_description: Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is a Brooklyn-based artist and is widely known as one of the first women to gain large-scale recognition in the male-dominated world of street art. Caledonia took to the streets of New York while attending the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn 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.
  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.
  While much of Swoon'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.
context_section_description: Callie Curry was born in New London, Connecticut, and raised in Daytona Beach, Florida. She moved to the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, New York when she was nineteen to study painting at the Pratt Institute.
  Then, Curry joined groups in New York City like Grub, which provides free Dumpster-dived dinners in Brooklyn. She also founded the Toyshop collective, known for organizing events such as a march through the Lower East Side consisting of 50 people playing instruments made out of junk.
caption: A work by Swoon in Djerbahood,[6] Tunisia
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