Swoon explores possibilities at the Taubman

“I’m a printmaker first,” said Curry, who exhibits under the name Swoon, during a phone interview last week. “Because you can make multiples, there’s a sense that you can do a lot of things with it. … There’s a multiplicity that prompts me to say, ‘what’s next?’”

The Taubman Museum of Art is spotlighting Curry’s multifaceted approach in a retrospective exhibit that opened Friday and is scheduled to run until March 10. Reaching back through 20 years of Curry’s work, the exhibit blends portraiture, sculpture, film, audio and more to create a personal mythos of recurring images and ideas.

Curry’s art tackles themes of emotional and physical recovery, with pointed references to her parents’ drug addiction. On a larger scale, she explores the effects of economic upheaval and natural disasters in places like Braddock, Pennsylvania, and Haiti, both the sites of collaborative projects in which Curry turned her art to the cause of community redevelopment and constructing more earthquake-proof structures.

“In a moment when contemporary art often holds a conflicted relationship to beauty, Curry’s work carries with it an earnestness, treating the beautiful as sublime even as she explores the darker sides of her subjects,” said the Taubman’s description of the exhibit.

One of Curry’s biographical statements traces her art to a painting class that focused on Bob Ross techniques that she took as a child.

Now 46, Curry said that her public presentation of her artwork really began in 1999, when she was a student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she still is based. She would create portraits of people around her, then paste the paper prints to the walls of buildings — anonymously at first but eventually using the name Swoon.

Her detailed, gritty street art eventually drew international notice.

Over the years, Curry expanded her presentations in many directions, including building several “sculptural junk rafts” that were exhibited on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, and eventually sailed into Venice, where Curry made them part of the Biennale international art show — uninvited, but still getting a a rave review from a critic who said “Swoon’s work doesn’t come out of academic critique; it comes from necessity and vision.”

Some of the remnants of the junk rafts are included in Curry’s Roanoke exhibit.

Taubman Executive Director Cindy Petersen said that she first encountered Curry’s work last spring in Washington, D.C., where Curry was among the artists featured in the Positive Fragmentation exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Petersen said that she “was just attracted, drawn in by those intricate portraits.”

Soon Petersen, Curry, and Curry’s gallery — Turner Carroll in Santa Fe, New Mexico — were in talks about how to put together a deep dive into Curry’s art.

Curry said that previously, she had done only one retrospective show, and that the museum that hosted it had not taken part in the selection of works in the way Petersen did. Curry said she also appreciated how willing Petersen and the Taubman staff were to tailor the display of her art to the museum’s unusual spaces.

High ceilings allow a large, gazebo-like sculpture dedicated in part to ideas of motherhood. Nearby, another structure-based piece references the Greek myth of Medea killing her children. The museum walls’ angles and slopes offer unique mounts for wallpaper that Curry created with repeating patterns, along with a large assortment of portraits and other screened images. Parts of the exhibit were made on site, Curry said.

“It’s a pretty big undertaking for a museum to decide to do something like that,” Curry added. “I was really appreciating the Taubman.”

The exhibit includes spaces for visitors to make their own art, including designing hexagonal wooden tiles similar to those that Curry has created for multiple projects. The tiles decorated by exhibit visitors are to eventually adorn walls at the Rescue Mission of Roanoke and a Carilion Clinic mental health facility, Petersen said.

The exhibit starts and finishes with spaces meant to reference Curry’s workshop in Brooklyn, which Petersen visited while preparing the exhibit.

The entry space includes tools and print-making equipment like those Curry uses, along with books she finds inspiring. Multiple videos shown throughout the exhibit explain aspects of Curry’s art. A 17-minute stop-motion animation film that Curry created, titled Cicada, can be viewed.

The final room in the exhibit also evokes a workshop, but this time involving Curry’s present-day work in progress — “almost like a peek into my studio … like me opening my hand,” Curry said.

The focus here again is film, but this time it’s with live actors depicting characters that Curry is creating for a fairytale based on her childhood, Petersen said.

Curry said that she hopes to eventually use these characters in a feature-length film she wants to direct. She said that she has been working with the Sundance Institute’s write-director lab to learn more about the entire process of creating in what for her will be a new medium.

She said that it feels like a logical extension of the past two decades.

“For me, it’s always how do you make art that goes and finds people where they are,” Curry said.