Into The Irrational Space: Conversation with SWOON

Broken Boxes is thrilled to present a very special conversation with the prolific artist Caledonia Curry, known globally as SWOON. In speaking with Broken Boxes producer Ginger Dunnill during the opening of Seven Contemplations at CONTAINER in Santa Fe, NM, Callie reflects on how art has been a healing practice for her throughout life. She talks about her pivot from art school to street art, in a time before the genre’s fame in the global art market and untangles the complexity of being a woman artist in male dominated spaces of that time, while giving credit to the continued brilliance of the next generation who are teaching us the expanse of the gender spectrum. We end our conversation with notes on the impact of accessing and valuing experiences of artists who came before, such as a mentor of hers, Judy Chicago. In closing, Callie offers a bit of fearless inspiration, imploring us as artists to always “follow the impulse” in order to unlock the next gift and adventure.

Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork.Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists. 

Her recent work has been focused on the relationship of trauma and addiction. Through community partnerships that center compassion and the transformative power of art, Curry draws on her personal history growing up in an opioid addicted family as a catalyst for connection and healing. Over the past 10 years, she has founded and developed collaborative multi-year projects in Braddock and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Komye, Haiti, that address crises ranging from natural disasters to the opioid epidemic. 

She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film.

Website: https://swoonstudio.org
IG: https://www.instagram.com/swoonhq/

Swoon’s Seven Contemplations retrospective exhibition is now on view at the new art space, CONTAINER in Santa Fe, NM. Special thanks to Tonya Turner Carroll and Michael Carroll for supporting us with space to conduct this interview in the gallery. 

Image: SWOON’s Seven Contemplations at Albright-Knox Northland, 2021

Song featured on this episode: What They Call Us by Fever Ray
Stream this episode on Broken Boxes Podcast via Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Full Circle: Conversation with Christine Howard Sandoval

In this episode we hear artist Christine Howard Sandoval in conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger. Christine breaks down the importance of research within her current practice and how her family have become an integral part of her work as she uncovers deeper relationship to her ancestors' pathways throughout California. She reflects on the complexity of connection, disconnection and reconnection to land that we all face today and how she uses performance, video surveillance documentation and large scale earthen paintings to expand upon these notions of belonging. Christine implores us to examine the future of art and education and to trust our own speed and trajectory as we navigate the artworld, reminding us that culture is not static. 

Christine Howard Sandoval is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in the unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam First Nations and is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). She is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, CA.

Howard Sandoval's work has exhibited nationally and internationally including: The Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo (Brazil), The Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), Oregon Contemporary (Portland, OR), The Museum of Capitalism (Oakland, CA), Designtransfer, Universität der Künste Berlin (Berlin, Germany), El Museo Del Barrio (New York, NY), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, NY).

Howard Sandoval's work has been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at the ICA San Diego (2021) and Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (2019), during which time she was the Mellon Artist in Residence at Colorado College. Howard Sandoval has been awarded numerous residencies including: UBC Okanagan, Indigenous Art Intensive program (Kelowna, BC), ICA San Diego (Encinitas, CA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), Triangle Arts Association (New York, NY). She is represented by parrasch heijnen, Los Angeles.

Photo credit: Rachel Topham Photography
Featured song: Journey In Satchidananda by Alice Coltrain

Healing Our Collective Imagination: Conversation with Kate DeCiccio

In this episode we get into conversation with artist, educator and creative strategist Kate Deciccio who shares how her practice is a space to unpack the ways whiteness, colonization and the prison industrial complex have harmed our collective imagination. Kate also presents tangible ways we may heal and be nourished collectively by collaborative processes of building through community led abolition and also in personal accountability to whiteness through practices such as somatics. 

Justice Calls for a Copless Future, Kate DeCiccio, 2020

Kate DeCiccio is an Oakland based artist, educator & creative strategist. Her work centers portraiture for counter narrative, community storytelling & cultural strategy on behalf of abolition and collective liberation.  DeCiccio is from Central Massachusetts where she grew up on occupied Nipmuc territory on her family’s 4th generation farm. She is the 3rd generation of her Polish and Italian ancestors and descends from 11 generations of English colonizers. Before working as an artist full time DeCiccio was a mental health and substance abuse counselor and taught art at San Quentin Prison,  St Elizabeths Forensic Psychiatric hospital &  Leadership High School. The intersections of creativity, mental illness, addiction and ancestral investigation have been driving themes in her art practice since she was a teenager. DeCiccio is committed to repairing the harm of her inherited legacy and working to heal our collective imagination by learning how to stand squarely in truth, accountability, renewed resilience and unknown possibility. She is currently working on a body of work called Anatomy of the Colonial Fetish & Cynical Pilgrim, stay tuned!

DeCiccio is a Co-Director at Performing Statistics, a project that supports youth organizers to close youth prisons across the country. Her collaborations include work with The People's Paper Coop, The Painted Desert Project, 826 National,  Critical Resistance, Survived and Punished, Planting Justice and Dear Frontline. She's been commissioned by Amplifier Foundation to create work on behalf of The Women's March, The Science March and March For Our Lives. Her work has been featured in news and media sources including The Huffington Post, Teen Vogue, The Daily Show, LA Times and Navajo Times. She’s exhibited at Galeria de La Raza, The Mission Cultural Center, The United States of Women, US Botanic Garden, Betti Ono Gallery, INTO ACTION, Interference Archive and Politicon. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress and The Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Song featured: September Song by Agnes Obel

Learn more about the work of Kate DeCiccio:
katedeciccio.com
IG: @k8deciccio

What's happening at Performing Statistics: 
www.performingstatistics.org
IG: @performingstatistics

Additional resources:

On Somatics: 
Book: My Body My Earth, Dr Ruby Gibson
Book: My Grandmothers Hands, Resma Menakem
https://generativesomatics.org

On Abolition: 
https://www.interruptingcriminalization.com
https://criticalresistance.org/abolish-policing/
https://www.commonjustice.org

Long Con: Sterlin Harjo & Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ep 3

Long Con is a series of conversations between Director Sterlin Harjo and Artist Cannupa Hanska Luger about life, art, film, history and everything in between - informally shared from the lens of two contemporary Native American artists and friends actively participating in the record of the 21st century.

In this conversation Sterlin Harjo and Cannupa Hanska Luger reflect on the process and outcome of Sterlin’s journey in creating the hit television series Reservation Dogs, now in its second season. They also talk about creating through a pandemic, lifting up independent filmmakers, swinging for the fences, the actors from Reservation Dogs and their character breakdowns, the latest custom hat by Cannupa, Indigenous film crews, with a little cameo by Sterlin’s son Ayo and so much more.

Sterlin Harjo is an award winning Seminole/Muscogee Creek filmmaker who has directed three feature films and a feature documentary all of which address the contemporary Native American lived experience. Harjo is a founding member of the five-member Native American comedy group, The 1491s. Sterlin’s latest project Reservation Dogs, Season 2 now streaming on FX. 

This is the third conversation between Sterlin & Cannupa for the podcast - check our archive to listen to the first two conversations.

Also check out Sterlin’s podcast ‘The Cuts’ where Sterin chats with the creative team from Reservation Dogs and many other creative peers, including Taika Waititi.

Song featured: Letters On The Marquee by Vincent Neil Emerson

Invisible Stories: Conversation with Tanya Aguiñiga

For this episode recurring host Cannupa Hanska Luger speaks with our dear friend and powerhouse artist and activist Tanya Aguiñiga about the cochineal beetle, clay as a healing practice for immigrant detainment camps, Indigenous solidarity and Tanya’s ongoing work with AMBOS: Art Made Between Opposite Sides.

Tanya Aguiñiga is an artist, designer, and craftsperson, who works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Aguiñiga began her career by creating collaborative installations with the Border Art Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo, an artist collective that addressed political and human rights issues at the U.S.-Mexico border. The artist co-built and for six years ran a community center in Tijuana, aimed at bringing attention through arts initiatives to injustices that the local community faced. Aguiñiga has maintained this spirit of activism and community collaboration throughout her career, going on to create many performances and installations that involve the participation of other artists, activists, and community members. In her installations, furniture, and wearable designs, Aguiñiga often works with cotton, wool, and other textiles, drawing upon Mesoamerican weaving and traditional forms. In 2016, in response to the deep polarization about the U.S.-Mexico border, Aguiñiga created AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides), an ongoing series of projects that provides a platform for binational artists. Her inaugural AMBOS project, Border Quipu, used brightly colored strands of fabric to create quipu—an Andean pre-Columbian organizational system—that recorded the daily commutes to and from the United States.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.

Support the work Tanya is doing with AMBOS which stands for Art Made Between Opposite Sides, including a donating directly to the  AMBOS Ceramics program, which Tanya speaks of in this podcast.

AMBOS (Art Made Between Opposite Sides): http://www.ambosproject.com
Donate to AMBOS Ceramics program: https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/ambos
Learn More about Tanya’s work: http://www.tanyaaguiniga.com

Music Featured: For The Young by Kindness