Ben Bloom

Hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “extraordinary,” Chris Kallmyer creates multi-disciplinary musical works that the New Yorker describes as “surprisingly complex.” Kallmyer is an innovator whose projects telescope from the political to the poetic prompting X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal to share that his work “promotes hopefulness and aids in resistance.”

Chris Kallmyer is an artist that 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 symphonies 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 has received 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 National Gallery of Singapore among other spaces in America and Europe. He’s created interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with musicians like Mark Mothersbaugh, Moses Sumney, Julia Holter, and Justin Vernon & Aaron Dessner’s Eaux Claires Festival. His collaboration with the photographer David Maisel was acquired into the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018.

In 2021 he founded the studio, Furniture Music, with the aim to redesign the sounds of the home. Through FM, he designs and fabricates sounding home goods and research-based projects for active listeners, architectural applications, and to promote social well-being through sound. Current projects include a new collection of wind chimes for Commune Design, a fountain to mark the home of a blind potter, and a redwood amphitheater for an elementary school.

Kallmyer completed his MFA in 2009 at California Institute of the Arts while studying with Wadada Leo Smith, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Aashish Khan, and Sara Roberts. Kallmyer worked closely with the storefront/collective Machine Project creating over 100 projects with founder Mark Allen between 2009 and 2018 at institutions like LACMA, Hammer Museum, the Walker, Tang Teaching Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Kallmyer is a longtime collaborator with the modern music collective Wild Up, with whom he is nominated for a 2023 Grammy Award for Julius Eastman’s “Stay On It.”