Ingrid Calame

Last updated
Ingrid Calame
Born1965 (age 5859)
The Bronx, New York City, United States
NationalityAmerican
Education State University of New York at Purchase
Alma mater California Institute of the Arts
Known forPainting
Style Abstract art
Website ingridcalame.net

Ingrid Calame (born 1965) is an American artist based in Los Angeles, known for her abstract, map-like paintings inspired by human detritus. Her works are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland, as well as many private collections. [1] Calame was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial. [2]

Contents

Biography

Early life

Calame was born in 1965 in The Bronx, New York. She grew up in Westchester County, where her mother was a physical therapist and her father taught physical education. [3] In college, Calame studied dance before shifting to painting. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the State University of New York at Purchase and later, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in art and film from the California Institute of the Arts. [3]

Career

Shortly after earning her MFA in 1996, Calame began a series of paintings based on the accidental spills on her studio floor. [4] In creating the series, Calame re-presented spontaneous spills as deliberately created art; this technique became a cornerstone of Calame's artistic process going forward. At the same time as Calame began developing this artistic technique, revelations about her grandmother's death impelled her to investigate the subject of human mortality. Calame increasingly chose to concentrate her artistic work on exhibiting "the ever-presence of our mortality and the almost equally human need to hide or not to see it," through tracing stains on streets and the floors of public spaces. [4]

In 2007 Calame was invited to produce a site-specific commission at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. [3] Out of that initial commission grew an entire exhibit, organized by the IMA's curator of contemporary art, Lisa Freiman, and titled:"Ingrid Calame: Traces of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway." The exhibit comprised several large colored-pencil drawings and enamel-on-aluminum paintings utilizing tracings of tire marks on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The centerpiece of the exhibit was a 76-by-20-foot enamel and latex wall painting of the pretzel-shaped skid mark made by Dan Wheldon in 2005 after winning the Indianapolis 500. [3]

In 2008 Calame became the Albright-Knox Art Gallery's first artist-in-residence. During her residence, Calame and a group of assistants traced marks left on sites in and around Buffalo: on the floor of an ArcelorMittal Steel plant, on the Gallery's parking lot, and in a dilapidated wading pool. The results became a series of paintings and drawings organized into the exhibit, "Ingrid Calame: Step on a Crack..." [5]

Calame's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and Kunstverein Hannover  [ de ], in Germany. [1]

Her artwork is incorporated into the Leimert Park station of the Los Angeles Metro Rail system. [6]

Artistic style

Calame's works are often boldly-colored, multi-layered abstractions derived from human detritus, stains, and graffiti. [3] Calame has stated that while her paintings and drawings are not maps, "they come from an impossible, cartographic impulse. I can't know the whole world, but going out into the world is really important to me, to try to know it through a kind of micro-mapping." [4] Noting the map-like aspects of Calame's works, art historians Gayle Clemans and Katharine Harmon featured Calame in their book The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vija Celmins</span> Latvian-American visual artist

Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Inka Essenhigh</span> American painter

Inka Essenhigh is an American painter based in New York City. Throughout her career, Essenhigh has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, 303 Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, and Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, Kotaro Nukaga, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, and Il Capricorno in Venice.

Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jo Baer</span> American minimalist artist (born 1929)

Josephine Gail Baer is an American painter associated with minimalist art. She began exhibiting her work at the Fischbach Gallery, New York, and other venues for contemporary art in the mid-1960s. In the mid-1970s, she turned away from non-objective painting. Since then, Baer has fused images, symbols, words, and phrases in a non-narrative manner, a mode of expression she once termed "radical figuration." She lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements.

Peter Ford Young is an American painter. He is primarily known for his abstract paintings that have been widely exhibited in the United States and in Europe since the 1960s. His work is associated with Minimal Art, Post-minimalism, and Lyrical Abstraction. Young has participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions and he has had more than forty solo exhibitions in important contemporary art galleries throughout his career. He currently lives in Bisbee, Arizona.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert H. Hudson</span> American artist

Robert H. Hudson is an American visual artist. He is known for his funk art assemblage metal sculptures, but he has also worked in painting and printmaking.

Ed Moses was an American artist based in Los Angeles and a central figure of postwar West Coast art.

Richard Ernst Artschwager was an American painter, illustrator and sculptor. His work has associations with Pop Art, Conceptual art and Minimalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hannelore Baron</span> American artist (1926 - 1987)

Hannelore Baron was an artist who created highly personal, book-sized, abstract collages and box constructions, and exhibited in the late 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeanne Silverthorne</span> American sculptor

Jeanne Silverthorne is an American sculptor, known for cast-rubber sculptures and installations that explore the artist's studio as a metaphor for artistic practice, the human body and psyche, and mortality. She gained prominence in New York City in the 1990s, as one of several material-focused sculptors who critiqued the austere, male-dominated Minimalist movement by embracing humble, unorthodox media and hand-made, personal and ephemeral qualities championed by artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. She treats the studio as a physical and conceptual site to be excavated, documented and inventoried, examining in the words of Sculpture's Jan Riley "the end of studio arts … and the impossibility of this mode of expression regaining its former creative validity and vitality in today’s world." Art in America critic Raphael Rubinstein wrote that, like the late studio paintings of Philip Guston, Silverthorne examines "deeply melancholic realms, enlivened by the occasional mordant joke, in which lowly objects are relentlessly and lovingly queried for a meaning they never seem quite ready to yield."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John McLaughlin (artist)</span> American painter

John Dwyer McLaughlin was an American abstract painter. Based primarily in California, he was a pioneer in minimalism and hard-edge painting. Considered one of the most significant Californian postwar artists, McLaughlin painted a focused body of geometric works that are completely devoid of any connection to everyday experience and objects, inspired by the Japanese notion of the void. He aimed to create paintings devoid of any object hood including but not limited to a gestures, representations and figuration. This led him to the rectangle. Leveraging a technique of layering rectangular bars on adjacent planes, McLaughlin creates works that provoke introspection and, consequently, a greater understanding of one's relationship to nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joyce Kozloff</span> American artist (born 1942)

Joyce Kozloff is an American artist known for her paintings, murals, and public art installations. She was one of the original members of the Pattern and Decoration movement and an early artist in the 1970s feminist art movement, including as a founding member of the Heresies collective.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Rubins</span> American artist

Nancy Rubins is an American sculptor and installation artist. Her sculptural works are primarily composed of blooming arrangements of large rigid objects such as televisions, small appliances, camping and construction trailers, hot water heaters, mattresses, airplane parts, rowboats, kayaks, canoes, surfboards, and other objects. Works such as Big Edge at CityCenter in Las Vegas contain over 200 boat vessels. Stainless Steel, Aluminum, Monochrome I, Built to Live Anywhere, at Home Here, at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, contains 66 used aluminum boats and rises to a height of 30 ft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald Bladen</span> Canadian-American painter and sculptor (1918-1988)

Ronald Bladen was a Canadian-born American painter and sculptor. He is particularly known for his large-scale sculptures. His artistic stance, was influenced by European Constructivism, American Hard-Edge Painting, and sculptors such as Isamu Noguchi and David Smith. Bladen in turn had stimulating effect on a circle of younger artists including Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and others, who repeatedly referred to him as one of the 'father figures' of Minimal Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polly Apfelbaum</span> American contemporary visual artist (born 1955)

Polly E. Apfelbaum is an American contemporary visual artist, who is primarily known for her colorful drawings, sculptures, and fabric floor pieces, which she refers to as "fallen paintings". She currently lives and works in New York City, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ree Morton</span> American visual artist (1933–1977)

Ree Morton was an American visual artist who was closely associated with the postminimalist and feminist art movements of the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Lawrance Lobe</span> American sculptor

Robert Lawrance Lobe is an American sculptor. He was born in Detroit and grew up in Cleveland. He received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1967 and then pursued post-graduate work at Hunter College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Spence (artist)</span> American visual artist

Andrew Spence is an American artist known for abstract paintings that combine a minimalist vocabulary with playful references to the observed world. In the 1970s and 1980s, he gained recognition as one of a number of younger artists who were re-examining geometric modernism through a contemporary lens that invited humor and reference to everyday objects and life experience into the tradition. Spence's method of distilling visual phenomena into simple, emblematic images has been compared to Ellsworth Kelly, but his work has differed in its more even balance between abstraction and recognition, intuitive approach, and varied, expressive paint surfaces. Art in America critic Ken Johnson wrote that his work maintains "an ironic tension between lofty purism of modernist geometry and earth-bound ordinariness of the vernacular sources." In later paintings, Spence has increasingly obscured the original inspirations of his abstractions, in both form and titling. His work belongs to the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and National Endowment for the Arts.

Cathleen Chaffee is an American curator, writer, and art historian specializing in contemporary art. She currently serves as the chief curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York, where she joined in January 2014.

References

  1. 1 2 "Ingrid Calame". New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. 2015. Retrieved March 8, 2015.
  2. "Union List of Artist Names Online Full Record Display". Getty Union List of Artist Names. 2004. Retrieved March 8, 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Spears, Dorothy (October 28, 2007). "Stop Your Engines! The Artist Is Tracing". The New York Times. Retrieved March 8, 2015.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Harmon, Katharine; Clemens, Gayle (2009). The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. p. 106. ISBN   978-1-56898-762-0.
  5. "Ingrid Calame: Step on a Crack . . ". Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Retrieved March 24, 2015.
  6. Broverman, Neal (January 22, 2018). "An Early Look at All the Artwork Coming to the Metro Crenshaw Line Los Angeles Magazine". Los Angeles Magazine. Retrieved April 21, 2019.