Ingrid Jacobson

b. 1948

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Ingrid Croce became an artist at eight-years-old, laying stitches in her grandmother’s Philadelphia dress shop.

When, as a teenager, Ingrid lost both of her parents to illness, she turned to collage to organize personal chaos. Her work earned her an early residency at New York’s Museum of Folk Art, and she went on to attend the Rhode Island School of Design.

At RISD, Croce applied her frenetic, generative process to design study under Gerald Immonen, working in wine cork and India ink. Shortly thereafter, she transferred to Moore College of Art, taking up painting with her mentor, Harold Jacobs. Inspired by Chagall’s bold, beautiful brush strokes and Rauschenberg’s domestic miscellany, Croce honed the mixed media technique that drives her current work.

After signing to Capitol Records with her late husband, Jim Croce, Croce left Moore to pursue other arts.

The art of music

writing/singing folk, pop, and R&B music (including the CMT award-winning “Age.”)

The art of motherhood

raising a son, musician AJ Croce, as a single parent.

The art of running 

taking third place in her category at the Stockholm Marathon.

The art of hospitality

pioneering the revitalization of San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter by establishing Croce’s Restaurant & Jazz Bar with husband, Jimmy Rock.

The art of literature

penning the award-winning biography, I Got A Name: The Jim Croce Story, and publishing three cookbooks (Thyme in A Bottle, Photographs and Memories, San Diego Restaurant Cookbook: Recipes from America’s Finest City) and the Jim Croce Anthology: The Stories Behind The Songs.

The art of television

producing documentaries for VHI Behind The Music, PBS, and CMT

A “woman who moves the city,” the artist was honored with the Women in Leadership award (2015) and the San Diego Business Hall of Fame’s Lifetime Laureate award (1998) for her “extraordinary contributions to the San Diego community” as an “exemplary role model and an inspiration for youth.”

Returning to her mixed media practice in 2013, Ingrid leaned into the recreation and assemblage of collage landscapes to weave personal and cultural histories. Love and loss. Triumph with trauma. Art as the anecdote to despair.

From the sun-filled Bankers Hill studio that serves as her creative refuge, Ingrid welcomes artists of all disciplines to join her in playfully tangling past and present. At your best, you contain multitudes. At your best, you are everything all at once.