Swoon and Jeffrey Deitch in Conversation: ArtLeadHer Teams Up with Pen + Brush

SWOON AND JEFFREY DEITCH IN CONVERSATION

A fundraising event benefiting the Heliotrope Foundation and Pen + Brush

Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2017 from 7 to 10 p.m.

Pen + Brush, 29 East 22nd Street

The Heliotrope Foundation, a nonprofit founded by Swoon to help communities respond and heal after natural disasters and other urgent social crises, is teaming up with Pen + Brush, a women-in-the-arts advocacy foundation and exhibition space, to host a fundraiser

organized by ArtLeadHER founder and curator Mashonda Tifrere.

The reception will feature a conversation between Swoon and her longtime gallerist and mentor, Jeffrey Deitch. The two will discuss, in addition to Swoon’s work and the state of the street art genre, the pair’s longstanding relationship, which began when Swoon’s true identity (and even the fact that she was a female) were still relatively concealed behind her street art moniker. In 2002, when Deitch first tried to track her down, mutual acquaintances speculated to him that there was no way she would ever want to meet; that she worked undercover and was “radically opposed to commercial galleries and the art market.” Still, Deitch put the word out that he wanted to connect with her; he believed that the most driven and talented of those who started on the streets should not be confined to a single medium and context, and that the ambition of Swoon’s work needed additional platforms. She agreed to a meeting in 2003, and the rest has been hard work and history. Fourteen years later, while Swoon’s work has adorned the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, L.A. MOCA, Mass MoCA, the Tate Modern, the Dean Collection (of Swizz Beatz), and many more, she spends much of her time enveloped in art and social practice by way of arts-based community building initiatives in, among others, Haiti and the Rust Belt town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. In 2013, Swoon founded the Heliotrope Foundation as way to streamline fundraising for these community projects.

Tickets are $100 and include a Heliotrope Print, which are $50 limited edition fine art prints with 100% of proceeds benefiting the Heliotrope Foundation. More information and an online print shop is at heliotropeprints.org. Five new Heliotrope Prints will be available exclusively to event attendees before they are released to the public the next day. Ticketing link: bit.ly/swoondeitchconvo