Swoon the Red Skein

The articles and essays of the world's greatest art critics and curators (Jerry Saltz, Jeffrey Deitch, RJ Rushmore, Pedro Alonzo, Judy Chicago, etc.) give the work of SWOON, whose real name is Caledonia Dance Curry, its rightful place in the world of art in this beautiful 224-page monograph published by Drago.

When discussing the collage work of SWOON, the most important female street artist born in 1977 in Connecticut, Hans Ulrich Obrist (director of the Serpentine Gallery, curator and art critic), quotes Édouard Glissant, thinker of the concept of "creolité". To approach SWOON's work is to approach a reflection on identity as an "archipelago of islands" to use the Martinique thinker's image. An approach that is completed by the author and physicist specialising in addiction issues, Gabor Mate, with the idea of care in SWOON, care that art can only provide when it is a "conscious" process.

This is exactly what you get when you turn the pages of "SWOON, The Red Skein": SWOON repairs, rebuilds and protects. First exhibited at the legendary Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, her art, inspired by the work of Banksy or Gordon Matta-Clark, quickly spills over the walls of institutions: Printed collages of human-sized portraits with lines inspired by German expressionism and Indonesian shadow theatre in the streets of Brooklyn, Manhattan, New Orleans or Mexico City, large-scale mixed media portraits, "Swimming cities", constructions of recycled materials that are islands as much as they are refuges, her work with communities such as the construction of "artistic" houses for refugees from Haiti, manicures for drug addicts, or the restoration of an abandoned church in Braddock, in the American rust belt in Pennsylvania.

"SWOON The Red Skein", with its careful and delicate layout, is the catalogue of an exhibition outside the walls of museums, on a global scale, of contemporary art created with and for the human beings around the artist.