Artwork Description
Swoon – Alison the Lacemaker (Dithyramba)
Dimensions: 23 x 9.5 x 0.75″
Year: 2022
Medium: block print and hand painting on paper and 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.
When drawing portraits, Swoon often has a historical reference in mind. Alison the Lacemaker draws inspiration from the works of Johannes Vermeer, an artist who rejected the prevalent Christian iconography of the seventeenth century to paint images of everyday life. In the image, a friend of the artist, Alison, sits quietly at work sewing. The title of the work directly references Vermeer’s The Lacemaker.
Alison the Lacemaker is an archetype within Swoon’s iconography. She is knitting together the elements of life, creating a beautiful pattern out of the chaos. Judy Chicago, who considers Swoon her “radical art daughter,” once said of Swoon’s image of Alison that it evokes the Hebrew concept of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world.