Location: Petaluma, CA
Medium: Sound, Installation, Performance, Public Art, Social Practice, Music, Design
Website: chriskallmyer.com
Chris Kallmyer is an artist and musician based in Petaluma, California, whose practice sits at the intersection of music, art, and design. Born in Washington D.C. in 1985, he came of age in the DC punk scene before completing an MFA in Music at the California Institute of the Arts in 2009, where he studied with jazz trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, composer Wolfgang von Schweinitz, and north-Indian classical musician Aashish Khan, among others. His work creates collective experiences driven by a sustained interest in community, deep listening, landscape, and embodied experience.
For nearly a decade (2009–2018), Kallmyer was a core collaborator with Machine Project, the Los Angeles–based nonprofit arts space founded by Mark Allen, contributing to over 100 projects at institutions including LACMA and the Hammer Museum. In 2021 he founded Furniture Music, a studio that produces sounding home goods and research-based projects aimed at active listeners, architectural applications, and social well-being through sound. The studio occupies a converted agricultural shed on Silver Penny Farm in Petaluma, California, run by his aunt, Cowgirl Creamery co-founder Sue Conley.
Kallmyer’s interdisciplinary practice operates through a collaborative studio model that expands fluidly to include architects, ceramicists, technologists, gardeners, musicians, and craftspeople. His work has been presented internationally at venues including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, the Getty Center, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and the National Gallery of Singapore, and he has received commissions from numerous major cultural institutions.
Kallmyer’s work is rooted in a participatory philosophy of music-making, inviting non-musicians into collective sonic experiences through touch, taste, and everyday materials. He transforms ordinary objects — raw timber, handmade bells, ceramic clay, split-flap departure signs — into instruments and installations that probe the boundaries between composer, performer, and audience. His interest in Fluxus poetics and post-concert-hall ritual runs throughout his practice, whether in intimate gallery performances or large-scale public commissions.
A recurring concern in his work is the accessibility and politics of listening. Installations such as Ensemble (2019) — a communal carillon built from raw timber and handmade bells — invite group music-making as a meditative and communal act, while Song Cycle uses a kinetic split-flap sign to generate ever-shifting musical scores in the lobbies of concert halls and art museums. More recently, his Furniture Music studio has extended this inquiry into the domestic sphere, designing wind chimes and ambient objects crafted from aluminum, copper, and salvaged old-growth redwood, intended to cultivate attention and well-being through sound in everyday life.
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