Time to Be Happy | Swoon

Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is arguably the #1 Female Street Artist in the world. She has taken over The Brooklyn Museum, exhibited within the Metropolitan Museum of Art and so many others, as well as being a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork.

Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists.

1. What inspired you to become an artist? Well, I think like most artists, I was always an artist. But the moment that I felt serious was when I first learned how to paint with oil paint when I was ten and I went to a class in Florida. These were available because amazingly, Bob Ross was from the town nearby me and he had taught all these painting teachers to do his style of painting, like the Bob Ross television show.

And so I kind of accidentally joined a class of retirees when I was ten. And at first we were like, oh, no, we're in the wrong place. And they were just like, no no no, join us. So they took me in and art adopted me and they taught me how to paint all these flowers yeah, with oil paint.

And then I felt like a really serious artist.

2. What was the first artwork you sold? I remember the first moment that I knew that other people thought I was an artist, that was a big moment. It was when I was in high school, I was like a freshman and I had this huge painting. For some reason I had to carry it across the school and I was super embarrassed and I was like turning it towards myself so nobody saw it because I was like, they're going to make fun of me.

And then people started to see it and they started to freak out. What the hell are you painting? Oh, my God. It's amazing. And then I understood that they actually liked it and that it wasn't something I should hide.

3. What was the most meaningful piece you created? The most meaningful piece is one that I did recently and it's called the Medea. And it's meaningful for me because I had just done this really deep exploration of my kind of deepest, most hidden psychological fears and like a lot of healing around it and but a lot of the stuff that I was working on still felt very taboo. It was a lot of very dark kind of family and childhood history and so there's always like a strong taboo against talking about things like that. And so I had to just really break that taboo and work through sharing those things publicly, kind of through this artwork.

And it's this huge artwork, and it kind of looks like a doll house, and it looks very inviting when you first see it, but the closer you get to it, the more you realize there's these kind of dense layers of history that are essentially about intergenerational trauma and how we heal that.

4. Share your experience creating the Clock. When I first started to work on the clock, the first thing I noticed was that, unconsciously, I had grabbed a piece out of my tile that felt very similar to the pattern on the pendulum. And when I placed it next to it, I was like, oh, my God, it's, like, almost the same. And it just made me feel connected to the history of craft in these old objects. And I think one of the things that I really love about the old objects is the handmade craft and the craft decisions that are sort of that kind of decorative language that you still see within the curves of the wood and the joinery and all these things that aren't both. They're not really present in modern furniture unless it's meant to look retro, you know?

And so there's just something about that I was connecting with and then also just kind of enjoying the title, when I was writing Time To Be Happy, I was thinking how I'm really in that moment right now for myself. I think before the pandemic, I was deep into, like, working through intergenerational trauma, and I was also doing a lot of really heavy projects, and then the second it hit, and the whole world went into this heavy place, right? And now there's this moment of feeling, like, knowing that we just survived something together. Those of us that did that, there's this sort of imperative to celebrate life.

Clock includes this NFT and 90 minutes of visual video art featuring 50 artists captured by Benzi.