Catch the Artist and Activist Known as Swoon’s First Dallas Exhibit at Klyde Warren Park

Klyde Warren Park’s President’s Circle just held another fabulous party. This time, on the eve of the opening of the Dallas Art Fair and in partnership with Dior and Yardbird restaurant. All to celebrate the unveiling of The House Our Families Built by Caledonia Curry, an artist who goes by the name Swoon.

The party, a culmination of the courtship between the Dallas Art Fair and Klyde Warren Park, was the sophisticated type of event that many are coming to expect from the donor program. The green space that anchors much of the city’s Arts District has long hoped to feature rotating public art installations and has finally gotten the opportunity to do just that with The House Our Families Built. Swoon’s work has been featured in countless solo and group exhibitions in major museums and galleries around the world. Most notably the Brooklyn Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the MIMA Contemporary Art Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Santa Fe-based Turner Carroll Gallery, in conjunction with the Fair and the Park, is presenting Swoon’s mobile diorama and audio installation which was created in 2020 on the mobile platform of a converted 14-foot box truck. The work was part of the PBS American Portrait initiative where first-person stories were collected, and in Swoon’s case, the artist asks viewers to consider how ancestral histories inform the understanding of ourselves. This is the artist’s first work to be seen in Dallas and will be on view through November 21.

But back to the party, Deborah Scott, on the arm of her dashing husband, John, was in one of her signature jumpsuits — this one denim and emblazoned with “Come Together” on the back. Since Wendy Payne‘s husband, Bill, had another commitment, she decided to make it a girl’s night bringing friends Capa Aikman and Alyson Griffith along. My favorite fashionable duo — mother/son Linda Ewing and Tanner Ewing — didn’t disappoint. Her in a Libertine jacket that every other girl seemed to stop her and ask about and he in a buttery soft vintage leather jacket that he shared has been in his closet since high school.

Others spotted in the crowd included Klyde Warren Park Board members Sheila and Jody Grant; Dior’s Anne DeFillippo and Simeon Mishev; the Nasher Sculpture Center’s Curator of Contemporary Art Vivian Li; Turner Carroll Gallery’s Tonya and Michael Carroll;  Claire Grant; Lynn and Allan McBee, and Greg Frary.