Indira Allegra is re-imagining what a memorial can feel like, the scale on which it can exist and how it can function through the practices of performance, sculpture and installation. Deeply informed by the ritual, relational and performative aspects of weaving, Allegra explores the repetitive crossing of forces held under tension be they material, social or emotional.
Their work has been featured in exhibitions at Museum of Arts and Design, The Arts Incubator in Chicago, John Michael Kholer Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Mills College Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton, Museum of the African Diaspora, The Alice Gallery and SOMArts among others. Their commissions include performances for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland and SFJAZZ Poetry Festival. Allegra’s work has been featured on BBC Radio 4, Art Journal, KQED and Surface Design Magazine. She has been the recipient of the Artadia Award, Tosa Studio Award, Windgate Craft Fellowship and Jackson Literary Award and has received support from the Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, MAP Fund and Queer Cultural Center. She is the 2019/2020 Burke Prize winner, Eureka Fellow and a triennial 2019-2022 Montalvo Art Center Sally and Don Lucas Artist Fellow. Allegra teaches in the Graduate Art and Visual Culture Department at Mills College.
For more information, please see: https://www.indiraallegra.com, and on Instagram @indiraallegra, and to support the artist directly through Venmo @Indira-Allegra or Patreon https://www.patreon.com/indiraallegra
Indira Allegra. Image courtesy of the artist.
“I think the work right now is in mourning and remaking ourselves less than making objects. I think the work right now is in establishing and defending/nourishing networks of care. We have to be adaptable. I think now is the time to take whatever our studio practices have taught us about ourselves as human beings and put those lessons to use in society at large. If artists are to be valued as thinkers, problem solvers and movers of memory and emotion then we must be supported even when we cannot make objects for exhibition or sale. An economic system which champions the push to produce - forces consistent output, without consistent support for an artist's input is one part of the dysfunction of the moment. If we are to survive as artists we cannot move forward in this way. We will lose ourselves. The work right now is in the mourning. Mourning for the touch we have lost from our loved ones while in quarantine. Mourning the senseless loss of black and indigenous life which is not new for some of us and a dawning reality for others. Mourning a kind of economic precarity which is not new for some of us and a dawning reality for others. People who do not deal with the grief in their lives become a hidden danger to others (I think we all have examples of this in our own lives). Let us be about the responsibility of mourning so we can actually be of service to each other and to our field as a whole for the long term. We are on viral time now. There is no waiting this out. There is no use in pretending that we are not being shaped by grief. Covid is sculpting us in real time. This time, we are the work which is being produced.”