Swoon

Artist Caledonia Curry is known as Swoon to admirers who follow her work on streets and in galleries all over the world. She is perhaps best known for the life-sized prints and figural paper cutouts she has pasted on walls for the past ten years, each portrait taking on a new life as it is slowly destroyed by the elements. Much of Swoon's work is like this - beautiful and powerful but ephemeral. Her projects are often grand in scope, requiring months of preparation and huge numbers of collaborators to make them a reality. And then they disappear. Deitch Projects owner Jeffrey Deitch provides an introduction to the artist and her work, and other contributors include: culture critic and curator Carlo McCormick, Nonsense NYC editor Jeff Stark, journalist and Toyshop-member Rollo Romig, gallery director Thomas Beale, and playwright LIsa D'Amour. Swoon herself writes the captios and an essay on her Miss Rockaway project.

Ana Lombardo

Peter Sutherland

Ken Miller

A wild ride alongside a band of New York City's most feared and respected inhabitants, bike messengers, Pedal follows the frenetic trips and lives of the cyclists who live by their own rules of the road. Going straight to the centre of this urban subculture, Sutherland also highlights in-between events like sprints, distance racing and skid contests, all the while showing us the riders' elegant physicality, complex individuality and unique community that crosses boundaries of race, gender, age and class. The DVD follows the messengers as they make their deliveries on time.

Pedal

Curry Caledonia

n 224 pages, with more than 200 coloured images, this book explores the work of Caledonia Curry, also known as Swoon, and her aim "to bring a human presence to the street in a delicate way". Covering her works on the street and in the studio, animation projects, collaborations, museum installations and community-based projects, The Red Skein is the most interesting and valuable collection of the artist's works. Of particular interest is "Persephone, Medea, Hecate: Constructing a crossroads for art and psychedelic-assisted therapy", an intimate and moving text in which Caledonia explains her background and what art means for her. The in-depth book also includes an introduction by bestselling author Dr Gabor Mate, a Hungarian physician with huge expertise on a range of topics including addiction, stress, and childhood development. There are also essays by RJ Rushmore (one of the youngest and most respected critics of street and graffiti art in the world), Melena Ryzik (New York Times reporter who was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment), Jerry Saltz (American art critic, senior art critic for The Village Voice and columnist for New York magazine) and Pedro Alonzo (Boston-based independent curator and Adjunct Curator at Dallas Contemporary). Other contributors include Hans Ulrich Obrist (director of Serpentine Gallery, Art curator, critic and historian of art), Jeffrey Deitch (art dealer and curator, director of the Moca 2010-2013) and Judy Chicago (feminist artist, art educator and writer).

Swoon

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