Chris Kallmyer
About this Artist
Chris Kallmyer is an artist who creates collective experiences with music, art, and design. The work is driven by his interest in the perception of community, listening, landscape, and embodied experience. He often collaborates with museums and orchestras to create interventions that confront pressing issues of institutional reform through the experience of sound in situ. This means that the work can take on many forms, including installations, public artwork, curatorial projects, publications, workshops, and performances.
Kallmyer works at a variety of scales and employs a co-operative working method that enables him to work in different materials and across fields. This means that his studio expands and contracts freely to include specialized craftspeople like architects, ceramicists, technologists, gardeners, musicians, photographers, and master carpenters. These specialists make it possible to engage broad audiences in the public sphere through unusual projects that can inspire wonder and rigor alike.
The artist has garnered commissions from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, STUDIO TeatrGaleria in Warsaw, and the City of Los Angeles among other spaces in America and Europe. He’s created interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with organic food pioneers Sue Conley and Albert Strauss, and musicians Mark Mothersbaugh, Moses Sumney, Julia Holter, and Justin Vernon & Aaron Dessner’s Eaux Claires Festival. His 2018 collaboration with the photographer David Maisel was recently acquired into the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Kallmyer completed his MFA in Music at California Institute of the Arts while studying with Wadada Leo Smith, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Aashish Khan, and Sara Roberts. Between 2009 and 2018 he worked closely with the storefront/collective Machine Project, creating over 100 projects with founder Mark Allen at institutions like LACMA, Hammer Museum, the Walker Art Center, Tang Teaching Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum.