While roaming the streets of Brooklyn, NYC, and in particular Red Hook, I encountered something I had never seen before: gorgeous black and white (sometimes with a dash of colour) paper cutouts pasted on red metal plates. The work itself, the combination with the red backgrounds: it blew my mind and I was mesmerized. I went on clicking my camera frantically. I needed to document this work!
Meet the artist: Swoon
As soon as I was back home from my adventures in New York City I decided I needed to find out more about the artist. I learned by googling something like 'paper cut out street artist brooklyn' the artist name of this genius woman was Swoon.
Street artists fascinate me, since they clearly want to be seen but create huge amounts of work that will never be able to be transferred to a museum or the private collection of an art collector. Their motives must be based on something else, varying from delivering a (political) message to simply grow a name.
Swoon, I learned, was a woman who didn't feel like she really 'fitted' in society and wanted to take steps in a different direction. She started creating street art, at first anonymously, but as soon as she (quite literally) 'dreamed up' her name Swoon she started tagging her work that way.
A funny thing I read is people were looking for a man called Swoon and were surprized to find out Swoon was actually a woman. When I walked the streets of Brooklyn in 2014 I actually met a few more female street artists (I must say I met them in daylight though! Coincidence? Or is that safer for women artists?), but generally street artists (still) tend to be men.
Nowadays her name is more known and she even had an exhibition in Brooklyn Museum with a huge piece in 2014.
Meet the art: portraits and decorations
I noticed the amount of detail and attention that is put into every piece: be it the life sized portraits or the more ‘decorational’ pieces. A few of the portraits I found were simply gorgeous:
Often the portraits come with a few decorative shapes:
Like this one:
Meet the art: portraits with a story
I noticed many of the portraits carried details of stories or maybe their personalities or histories are embedded. I love this way of sharing a story of a person or a generation or a group. The individual face helps to relate, the detailed stories helps to zoom out and think about what might be going on somewhere in the world, being it around the corner or far far away.
The first one is of a muslim woman, you immediately notice there's more to see in the portrait than just a face:
Although a gorgeous face it is:
It's the dress or coat where a hint of a place can be seen. A mother and a (her?) boy walking down a street of an unknown place.
More colours added
A few of the pieces of art I found had a bit more colour in them.
There is so much detail in the artwork above I'm not even able to explain what you can see in it. I see many references to industrial history, Brooklyn itself, and art as a whole. I noticed a building site in the following piece. I know gentrification and the influence it has on different immigrant groups living in New York City is a huge discussion, but I can only guess as to if that's the meaning behind the pieces.
In the last piece I'll share today you can find a clear wink to children's drawings embedded in the piece, while the faces clearly show it's a piece created by Swoon. I'm fascinated by the facial expressions in this one and would love to know more about the background story of the piece. Who are these children? What's their history? The left one is clearly looking too worries for it's age.
The brilliance of Swoon
The brilliancy in the work of Swoon lies in the simple but effective decorative value she adds to the street. The random passerby will simple love the way her work decorates the streets. Do you think it's a coincidence all these pieces were glued on red metal plates? I don't, they match too wel and strengthen one another perfectly.
The more attentive passerby will notice the details of the work and start looking for the stories within the portraits. With this Swoon created something very lasting: her name and craft are extremely recognizable after walking through some of the streets in Red Hook. For those who live here and care for the neighbourhood she created an experience, a sharing of stories, something to be proud of, ponder, talk about with fellow 'Red Hookians'.
I'd love to have her live in my neighbourhood, that's for sure.
PS: Yesterday I shared a different series on street art in Red Hook. Tomorrow I'll share even more pieces of artist Swoon, since I still have more to share of this amazing artist. Until then: I'd love to know what you think about her artworks!
All photography on steemit.com/@soyrosa is created and edited by me, Rosanne Dubbeld, 2005-2018. Contact me if you want to discuss licensing or collaborations on creative projects :-)