Brooklyn-based artist Swoon celebrates everyday people and explores social and environmental issues with her signature paper portraits and figurative installations. She is best known for her large, intricately-cut prints wheat pasted to industrial buildings in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

For this exhibition, Swoon creates a site-specific installation in our rotunda gallery, transforming it into a fantastic landscape centering on a monumental sculptural tree with a constructed environment at its base, including sculpted boats and rafts, figurative prints and drawings, and cut paper foliage.

Often inspired by contemporary and historical events, Swoon engages with climate change in the installation as a response to the catastrophic Hurricane Sandy that struck the Atlantic Coast in 2012, and Doggerland, a landmass that once connected Great Britain and Europe and that was destroyed by a tsunami 8,000 years ago.

Swoon studied at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, and has become active in such humanitarian activities as Konbit Shelter Project, which helps Haitians create sustainable buildings, and Transformazium in Braddock, Pennsylvania, which works with local residents to revitalize their community.

Swoon: Submerged Motherlands is organized by Sharon Matt Atkins, Managing Curator of Exhibitions, Brooklyn Museum.