Badass Woman spotlights women who not only have a voice but defy the irrelevant preconceptions of gender.

Swoon’s ethereal paper sculptures have hung in New York’s MoMA and Los Angeles’s MoCA, but you’re just as likely to find her work on a brick wall in a forgotten street.

The artist, born Caledonia Curry, is a study in contrasts. A classically trained painter-turned-street art heavyweight, she’s best known for her breathtaking, goddess-like cut-out portraits, which have found fans in the fine art and graffiti worlds alike. Wheat pasted in cities across the world, they’re raw but also dreamy and—unlike most street art—boldly feminine.
“At first I really fought it. And then I was like, ‘You know what? Fuck this!’” Swoon says of her soft aesthetic. “Femininity and delicacy, all of these qualities are not respected on a grand scale. We don’t really have a cultural history of [appreciating] female genius, let’s call it, people who fully embody their art and their work in ways that express their femininity.” So she carved out a genre where girlishness and grit go hand in hand.

Swoon, 40, describes her early childhood in Daytona Beach, Fl., as chaotic. Her parents were both heroin addicts who struggled with mental illness and suicidal tendencies, themes that recur in her work. But her preteen years were characterized by more stability. Her father got clean, and when Swoon was 10, her mother enrolled her in an art class for retirees; somehow, there she found her place. Art became a mode of expression, therapy, and activism for Swoon, who launched an ongoing building and beautification project in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Below, she lets us into her colorful world—including her unlikely embrace by the boys’ club and that time she illegally sailed through Venice on a raft made of garbage.

Her first big fail: “Artists will tell you they were artists their whole lives,” says Swoon. But she points to the moment she stepped into that art class as a 10-year-old as her awakening. “The 80-year-old retired painters adopted me; they taught me how to paint. I’ve been a focused, confident artist because of them.” Years later, thought, her first attempt at street art was a disaster, she recalls. “I worked on it for a couple months, and then I went and tried to put it outside and it was a total failure. I must have been 22, and it was a linoleum block carving portrait. I didn’t know what I was doing. It came down immediately,” she says with a laugh. “But I kept going.”

From hideout to breakout: Swoon’s second attempt was more successful. By the early aughts—shortly after she graduated from Brooklyn’s prestigious Pratt Institute—her wheat-pasted murals had gained widespread recognition, though she kept her identity hidden behind the moniker Swoon. She was working as a waitress and selling art out of her apartment, when a friend in the art community told her that Jeffrey Deitch—the experimental curator whose gallery served as a launchpad for the most exciting, young talent—had been asking around, trying to connect with the mysterious Swoon. In 2005, they unveiled their collaboration: Swoon filled Deitch’s gallery with a sprawling dreamscape of paper sculptures that rocked the art world.

“Strangely,