Becca Kallem (b. 1980) is a Virginia-based artist and educator. She received her MFA in painting from the University of New Hampshire, with a BA in Art and Spanish from the College of William and Mary. Her work has been exhibited at various galleries including the Arlington Arts Center, Hillyer Art Space, the DC Center for the LGBT Community, and the Bowery Gallery in New York. She has had residencies at the Arlington Arts Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Chautauqua Institute, and a Fulbright fellowship in Madrid, Spain.
"In my painting and drawing, I am attuned to the quality of light as well as the materiality of paint and surfaces. I like the idiosyncracies and imperfections that develop during my somewhat messy painting process. No matter if a piece is abstract/invented or observational, I want the final result to be both solid and open: whole but ready to change and shift, to slip at the layers and edges. For me, this mix of ambiguity and certainty, the gestural and the geometric, relates to the complex self. How we all reconcile or at least push together parts that seem, by turns, conflicting and complementary."