Art gave Curry a language. It gave her joy. It gave her confidence. And it gave her a platform from which to launch into the wider world.
For longtime fans, Submerged Motherlands was a moody, dreamy, melancholy experience offering both artifacts and insight from Curry’s many journeys. Lacy papercut foliage fluttered from the limbs of a sixty-foot tall sculpture of a Haitian mapou tree.
Between the ocean hued walls towered three well-known figures from Curry’s 2011 museum exhibits: Thalassa, a Greek sea goddess with a belly swirling with horseshoe crabs and jellyfish; Mrs. Bennett, a portrait of the late Australian aboriginal artist Nyurapayia Nampitjinpa; and The Ice Queen, whose composed nobility presided over crumbling glaciers and shattered ice crystals. Papercuts of elegant sealife—phaeodaria, ascidiae, aspidonia—climbed the walls and drifted across the floor.
Moored amidst winding tree roots were two weathered art barges, vessels from the world-famous Swimming Cities flotillas that floated down the Hudson River in 2008 and crossed the Adriatic Sea from Slovenia to crash the Venice Biennale in 2009. Walkie, modeled after a young Haitian boy, crouched amidst sea plants and filigreed flotsam. Kamayura, of the Xingu nations in Brazil, represented devastation in the Amazon; Neenee, a young girl from an impoverished rust-belt town in Pennsylvania, offered hope with Braddock Tiles, the abandoned church Curry and cohorts are converting into an arts-driven community center.
Finally, the warm and hopeful image of Dawn and Gemma—a mother and her breastfeeding newborn—rose over a meditation hut layered with intricate wasps’ comb. This place, where visitors were invited to sit, talk, and contemplate, held the most personal pieces in the exhibit—two heartbreaking tableaus depicting Curry’s own mother as a fetus, infant, adult, and finally, as a skeletal wraith on oxygen tubes.
It was no secret that Curry’s mother was diagnosed with cancer not long after Curry began work on Submerged Motherlands. In the months that followed her mother’s death, Curry began to publicly share about her childhood, raising awareness about the findings of Gabor Maté, whose ground-breaking work with skid-row addicts suggests all addiction is rooted in trauma. But she also had to make art, for herself, for the world, to connect and communicate, and to change.
We weren’t surprised to hear that Curry decided to take a year off. No new projects. Just drawing, carving, and Heliotrope—which now encompasses ongoing work with Music Box, Konbit Shelter, and Braddock Tiles. She couldn’t have known that this would be the year when she would also suddenly, devastatingly, lose her father. When we sought her out, we found in her Philadelphia, still in the clutches of grief, working through Mural Arts with people in rehabs and prisons, seeking to understand and be understood, finding connection. As always, we are staggered by her grace.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 36, which is sold out. Get our latest issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
