Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Performance, weaving, sculpture, installation, writing, video
Website: indiraallegra.com
Indira Allegra (born c. 1980, Detroit, Michigan) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and founder of Indira Allegra Studio, a performative craft design studio based in Oakland, California. They received their BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2015. They are a United States Artists Fellow, and have received a Creative Capital Award, Burke Prize, Art Matters Fellowship, Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, Lambda Literary Fellowship, Gerbode Choreographer Award, Windgate Fellowship, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Their work has been featured in Artforum, The Art Newspaper, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and on KQED and BBC Radio 4. Their writing has appeared in TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, American Craft Magazine, Manual: A Journal About Art & Its Making, Cream City Review, Foglifter Journal, and forthcoming in the ART/WORK book series (Princeton University Press) and the RISD Museum journal.
Allegra is deeply informed by interiority, animism, and the ritual, relational, and performative aspects of weaving. As a recognized leader in the field of performative craft, they take weaving off the loom and use it as a framework to explore interlocking forces held under tension, whether material, social, or emotional. Their work reimagines memorial as a genre vital to life: rather than marking death, Allegra’s memorials hold the tension that grief creates inside people, objects, spaces, and rituals. In their signature series BODYWARP, the loom becomes an organ of memory — the artist uses their own body as the warp, held under tension in site-specific choreographies between maker, tool, and place.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your profile.