Indira Allegra

Indira Allegra was born in Detroit, Michigan and moved to Portland, Oregon in the 1980s. Allegra was a Biology major at Yale University in the late 1990s and received an AAS in Sign Language Interpretation at Portland Community College in the early 2000s. Additionally, Allegra studied dance at Lane Community College in the mid 2000s and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2015 from the California College of Arts in San Francisco.[1] Allegra has worked as a sign language interpreter, domestic violence advocate, union organizer, youth educator and in the service industry.[1]

Their work has been featured in exhibitions at Museum of Art 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 Burke Prize, Lucas Artist Fellowship, Eureka Fellowship, 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.

• Burke Prize Finalist exhibition at the Museum Art and Design in NY (2019) displays the works of the 2019 finalists and winner of the Museum's Burke Prize, awarded to a contemporary artist under the age of forty-five working in glass, fiber, clay, metal, and/or wood. In 2019, the jury of professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design awarded the unrestricted award of $50,000 to Indira Allegra. [2]

Installation view of Allegra's work at the Burke Prize Exhibition, 2019

• Even thread [has] a speech at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboyghan, WI (2019) examines how contemporary artists working in fiber materials and processes have inherited and broadened Lenore Tawney's (1907–2007) groundbreaking experiments in the field. Featuring works by eight contemporary artists who extend weaving conceptually, this exhibition intersects with architecture, performance, sound, painting, and installation to expand traditional concepts of fiber art, weaving, and structure. The works incorporate approaches that deconstruct, perform, explode, or compress the qualities that informed Tawney's practice and underpin textile and weaving histories. [3]

• Bodywarp at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, CA (2018) was solo exhibition by Indira Allegra exploring weaving as performance requiring a unique receptivity to tensions extant in political and emotional spaces. BODYWARP explores looms as frames through which the weaver becomes the warp and is held under tension, performing a series of site-specific interven-tions using her body. Like the accumulation of memory in cloth, looms and other tools of the weaver's craft become organs of memory, pulling the artist's body into an intimate choreography between maker, tool and the narrative of a place. [4]

• Bodywarp: Seamstress at The Alice Gallery in Seattle, WA (2018) explored the actual building housing the gallery, a former brothel in Duwamish territory. In Seattle, Washington, sex work was an integral part of the early economy and workers often listed their occupation as "seamstress". Seamstress honors these sisters of the cloth through a site-specific performance of BODYWARP at the Alice Gallery, located in Seattle's Hamilton building - a former brothel in the Georgetown neighborhood, an early red light district. [5]

• Art+Practice+Ideas at Mills College in Oakland, CA (2018) was a two-person exhibition in which Allegra exhibited Open Casket IX which explores ways in which grief is non-linear without a clear pathway to an end - exerting its force from every direction.
  

  Installation view of Open Casket IX at Mills College

• Past Presence at ProArts Gallery in Oakland, CA. (2017) was a two-person exhibition presenting work by Indira Allegra and Christopher R. Martin in response to politicized trauma in Black contemporary life. [6]

“The Pull of Unseen Forces: Stages of BODYWARP” Art Journal. 2018 [7]

"Praxis Texere" (excerpt) Foglifter Magazine volume 3 issue 1. 2018 [8]

Blackout: A Monograph, work by Indira Allegra Sming Sming Books. 2017 [9]

• Official website