Layered Stories: Alumna Opens Private Art Gallery
When her growing art career collided with domestic life, Josephine Tournier Ingram ’00 decided to secure a dedicated gallery space. The surging demand for her abstract acrylic paintings led to canvases crowding her home.
“Paintings were spilling into the guest studio,” she says. “And then I discovered spaghetti on one of them.”
Moving into Gallery Josephine near the Santa Barbara Courthouse Sunken Gardens felt like a homecoming. She and her husband, Jared ’00, lived a few blocks away after graduating from Westmont. Now open by appointment, the gallery celebrated its first 1st Thursday Art Walk on July 2.
As an art major, she found her classes easy, except for painting. “I felt like my paintings were terrible,” she says.
Josephine landed a graphic artist position at Powell-Peralta Skateboards in Goleta shortly after graduating and went solo five years later as her freelance work grew.
Despite her struggles in her college painting class, she held on to some small, blank canvases. “Jared kept telling me, ‘You should just get rid of those, you’re never going to paint on them,’” she says.
But once they bought their home and their second child arrived, something shifted.
“I put my son in the BabyBjörn, pulled out my acrylic paints and did a layer,” she says. “I let it dry, moved on, and did another layer.”
That son, now 12, is neurodivergent and a talented, creative illustrator.
“I don’t know if it was because of him and our connection, but everything flowed out of me,” she says. “I started painting, painting and painting.”
Ingram grew up with French and German parents in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. She hung her first painting at her home in 2014 and proudly posted a picture on social media. A professional ski racer near her hometown saw it and commissioned her to make another one just like it — and then ordered a second.
“Jared told me not to do it for money, but to keep it as my passion and do it for love when I want to,” she says. “I have no pressure.”
Josephine sees herself as a storyteller and her paintings as explorations of light, transformation, memory and place. Through layered abstraction, she reflects the persona of her patrons.
“That’s what’s so fun about commissions,” she says. “It’s not about me. I’m inspired by the colors of their house or their stories.”
She regularly donates her artwork to local schools and nonprofits, including CALM, which holds its annual Calm at Heart luncheon November 6 at Rosewood Miramar Beach. The winner of her auction lot will choose a painting at her gallery during a private champagne gathering with friends.
A member of the Westmont Art Council, Josephine keeps in touch with her mentors: art professors Scott Anderson, Tony Askew and Sue Savage. Chris Rupp ’00, interim director of the Westmont Ridley-Tree Museum of Art, installed the artwork at her gallery, while Kristen Walker ’08 served as the graphic designer.