@SwoonHQ

“Thalasa” By Swoon

“Thalasa” Inventory: 386 Size: 80 x 30 x 2.75 in Medium: Screenprint and hand painted acrylics on paper and wooden door. Creation Date: 2016

“Thalassa” The name Thalassa is Greek word for "ocean", a primordial incarnation of the sea that is not often personified. Thalassa is said to have given birth to all tribes of fish in the sea. She is the pull of the sea that comes from inside the salt water in our blood. “Thalassa was originally created for New Orleans. It was the months after the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf in 2010, and this body of water that I’d loved since I was a child was in peril. As I drew Thalassa surging up from the water I felt her rising like a wake up call, one reminds us of our inseparability from the sea. When I stand in front of the ocean, the word that always appears first in my mind is “mother”. For me there is no mistaking the sense that the sea is our first mother.”

Bio: Caledonia Dance Curry, known professionally as Swoon, is a Brooklyn-based artist. She is widely known as the first woman to gain large-scale recognition in the typically male-dominated world of street art. Callie was born in New London, Connecticut in 1977, and grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. She began taking drawing classes at age ten, and credits learning to paint with saving her from familial patterns of substance abuse and addiction. 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.

Although Swoon worked under the cover of night, the art world soon took notice of her intricate, visceral portraits, which shone from the sides of buildings all over New York City. In 2004, she was contacted simultaneously by influential gallerist Jeffrey Deitch, and The Museum of Modern Art, and soon began exhibiting her work in galleries and museums globally. With her immersive installation, Swoon: Submerged Motherlands, Callie became the first living street artist to show work at the Brooklyn Museum. Most recently, she transformed the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center with her two-floor solo show, “The Canyon,” which documented the arc of her career from guerilla artist to international sensation.

Today, Callie lives in Brooklyn where she continues to explore and raise awareness through her creative process. Her work can be found on the sides of buildings and streets worldwide and has been given both permanent and transient homes in more classical institutions, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, LA MOCA, Mass MoCA, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, and the São Paulo Museum of Art.