Art gave Curry a language. This gave her happiness. This gave her confidence. This gave her a platform into the wider world.
For long-time fans, “The Drowned Country” is a moody, dreamy, and melancholic experience that offers artifacts and insights from Curry’s many journeys. Lace-cut paper leaves flutter from the branches of a sixty-foot-tall sculpture of a Haitian mapou tree.
Between the ocean-toned walls stand three famous figures from Curry’s 2011 museum exhibit: Thalassa, the Greek sea goddess with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish swirling around her belly; Mrs. Bennett, a portrait of the late Australian Aboriginal artist Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa; and the Ice Queen, her calm nobility presiding over collapsing glaciers and shattered ice crystals. Cutouts of elegant sea creatures—brown algae, sea squirts, sea squirts—climb the walls and float across the floor.
Moored among the winding tree roots are two weathered art barges from the world-famous Swimming City fleet that drifted down the Hudson River from Slovenia across the Adriatic Sea in 2008 and crashed at the 2009 Venice Biennale. Walkie is modeled after a little Haitian boy, crouched among sea plants and delicate floats. Kamayura, a representative of the Xingu tribe of Brazil, represents the destruction of the Amazon. Neenee, a young girl from a poor Rust Belt town in Pennsylvania, brings hope through Braddock Tiles, an abandoned church that Curry and others are transforming into an arts-led community center.
Finally, warm and hopeful images of Dawn and Gemma—a mother and her nursing newborn—appear above a meditative cabin carpeted with intricate wasp nests. This space, which invites visitors to sit, talk and contemplate, houses the exhibition’s most personal works – two heartbreaking images depicting Curry’s own mother as a fetus, an infant, an adult and finally as a skeletal ghost on an oxygen tube.
It was no secret that Curry’s mother was diagnosed with cancer shortly after Curry began work on “Drowned Country.” In the months after her mother’s death, Curry began sharing her childhood publicly, raising awareness of the findings of Gabor Matt, whose groundbreaking research on ghetto addicts showed that all addiction stems from trauma. But she must also make art for herself and for the world to connect, communicate and change.
We weren’t surprised to hear Curry decided to take a year off. There are no new projects. Just painting, sculpting and heliotrope – work in progress now including Music Box, Konbit Shelter and Braddock Tiles. She couldn’t have known she would also lose her father suddenly and devastatingly this year. When we found her, we found her in Philadelphia, still grieving, doing mural art with people in rehab and prisons, seeking to understand and be understood, looking for connection. As always, we are stunned by her elegance. *
This article originally appeared in High Fructose Issue 36, which is now sold out. Subscribe to High Fructose here to get our latest issue.
