Ingrid Calame ’87

Ingrid Calame ’87 is a Los Angeles based painter, who “traces the contours of stains she finds on the streets of various cities. Calame’s technique mimics the appearance of gestural abstraction: the meticulous tracing preserves every splatter, trickle and drip of the original stains. These map-like images serve to document an intimate record of pedestrian life,” writes paceprints.com.

Calame is a full-time painting instructor in the Fine Arts Department at Otis College of Art and Design.

In 2019, Calame was named one of fourteen artists chosen to create permanent public art works for the Crenshaw/LAX Transit Project, an eight-mile extension of an existing metro line that will serve Los Angeles and surrounding communities. Her project, Talking Drums, will appear in the Leimart Park station.

Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Kunstmuseum San Gallen in Switzerland, and she has participated in group exhibitions such as the 2019 Havana Biennial in Cuba, and the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Calame has received grants and residency fellowships from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, among others.

She earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts.

Her monographs include Being Born (Snoëck, Germany), Ingrid Calame: Trace (Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh), Constellations (James Cohan Gallery, NY), and Ingrid Calame (Deitch Projects, NY).