Artist Ingrid Calame and guide Rich Vail during a site visit to Litelab in September 2007.

Community Connections

Community connections are an essential aspect of the project. When describing this project, Calame stated, "In Step on a Crack... my audience is also my subject matter–I give the people of Buffalo the opportunity to see an artwork constructed out of the marks and traces of their city, some marks of which they might have inadvertently created. I hope to draw the citizens of Buffalo to their museum by reflecting the most overlooked aspect of their environment–street marks and industrial detritus. Formally, I transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Similarly, I hope for the process of looking at art in the museum to be an inclusive and hallowed act of freedom of thought and imagination."

The working title of the residency had been Buffalo Trace. Back in her Los Angeles studio, in preparation for making the drawings and paintings that will make up the exhibition, Calame laid out hundreds of square feet of drawings that she and her team of tracers made while battling rain, wind, sun, and the heat generated by steel production for three weeks in June 2008. The quickly assembled tracing team navigated through the rules and regulations of each unique tracing site, and the resulting drawings held the experience of Buffalo in a working steel mill, in its abandoned grain elevators, in the tarred and re-tarred AKAG parking lot, in a dilapidated wading pool, and somehow also through the eyes of the students at two local schools and a community center who met Calame and learned about her work. Through weeks of painting and drawing, the artist said that her thoughts turned “playfully morbid,” seeing the drawings both as evocations of “decades of loss and disintegration of those places, but also as raw material for the childhood game that begins with the words, ‘Step on a crack . . . .’” The Western New York environments she traced, retraced, and painted have kept their integrity, but the resulting work evokes a more universal mindfulness. As Calame commented, "the traced numbers, paint, and cracks, like individual workers in a factory or children playing games, have retained their integrity, but have stopped short of being symbols—they are captured images that combine history, physical fact, decay, memory, and personal experience.”