SWOON Issue #32

The New York artist turns to the streets to give an invigorating face to ‘ordinary reality’

By Kristina Francisco
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am

Early last summer, when I first tried to interview swoon, the New York street artist was about to sail down the Mississippi River, Huck Finn–style, with some friends on a flotilla of rafts. Nearly a year later, on my second attempt, she’s packing up to travel the world for eight months.

Swoon, it seems, is always on the move. I get the impression that she’s stealthy, too, since she never reveals her full real name and her art’s considered vandalism in the eyes of the law. It’s been impossible to set up a phone interview.

But through her work — intricately cut and drawn portraits of family, friends, and neighbors wheat-pasted on public walls — passersby see a glimpse of the world through the 29-year-old’s eyes, a world full of people, emotion, and, above all else, life.

“I try to cultivate a respectful ethos even within a very brazen activity,” she says of the illegality of her work. “The truth is, I think the walls of cities should be a public sounding board, a sort of a visual commons, and so I don’t feel too conflicted about participating in what I see as a vital part of city life. I wanna know you live here. I want to see your name on the wall and your fingerprint all over the place.”

Growing up in Florida, swoon moved to New York in the late ’90s to study painting but soon rejected the art world she was once so excited to be near. “Almost instantly I began to perceive it as stifling and alienating, almost nothing spoke to me viscerally. So much of the work that I was seeing felt cold and distant and irrelevant really,” she says.

So swoon turned to the streets, at first postering small transparent collages intended to blend with the layers already there, then moving toward larger-than-life posters delicately rolled onto billboards and walls and in subway stations.

“I like areas where people are doing a lot of walking. Advertising is always trying to place itself a million miles above us, looming down with the shiniest, flashiest, most disconnected depictions of beauty — just out of reach like the rest of its promises — and I find myself trying to get down below that, at eye level and to depict the life that exists here at the bottom edge, our ordinary reality.”

Though her art is found on the streets from New York to Berlin, swoon has shown her work in galleries as well, mostly ones she respects, though she still feels divided about it. “I have since made my share of mistakes, shown in places that were the same kind of galleries I hated from the get-go, sold my work into collections where it inevitably becomes part of the same sterile canon that I have been trying to resist,” she explains. “But this shit is hard, trying to grow as an artist, support yourself, and not limit yourself, take opportunities as they come and not stay stuck inside some rigid ideal of keeping it real to death. I have definitely done everything I said I would never do at least once.”

As for her Mississippi voyage, it wasn’t what most people consider an ordinary trip. With a group of performers and artists called the Miss Rockaway Armada, she floated down the Mississippi on a raft made completely of trash, scraps, and discarded material, docking and giving workshops and performances along the way.

“Don’t wait for your context, create one for yourself,” she says. “Whether it’s street postering or making a flotilla of rafts that traverse the Mississippi, I’m creating my own context, without waiting for permission or an invitation. Sometimes the world is not going to know it’s ready for you until you get there.”