smart

This goes out to all those girls who’ve heard the message that intelligence and geekiness is antithetical to attractiveness.

Swoon works in a combination of wheat-paste and paper cutout to create life-sized, figurative and graphic street art with strength and femininity. While a great deal of her work has been done outside the confines of a gallery, she was classically trained as a painter before adopting street art techniques.

The artist formerly known as Caledonia Curry studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and started doing street art around 1999 at age 19. She's also a member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative, a grass-roots, decentralized group of artists who believe in art as both personal expression and collective action. This group contributes graphics to struggles for justice, both in the studio and on the streets, collaboratively and individually, all over North America.

Tomorrow night in Portland (Thursday, February 17 at 7:00 PM), renowned artist Carolee Schneemann will give a free performance lecture at PCC's Performing Arts Center on the Sylvania Campus. A product of the 1960s-70's New York art scene, her work challenged, shocked, and forced her audience to think about their reaction to women's bodies and feelings about physicality, often with her own body as part of the composition.