Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Performative craft, weaving, sculpture, assemblage, installation, poetry, dance
Website: indiraallegra.com
Indira Allegra (they/she, born c. 1980, Detroit, Michigan) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Oakland, California. Allegra was born in Detroit and grew up in Portland, Oregon. They studied biology at Yale University in the late 1990s before leaving, then completed an Associate of Applied Science in Sign Language Interpretation from Portland Community College (2005) and a BFA from California College of the Arts (2015). They have worked as a sign language interpreter, domestic violence advocate, union organizer, and teaching artist. Allegra has been a visiting artist at UC Berkeley (Shelly Osborne Visiting Artist) and at Mills College (Art + Process + Ideas Visiting Artist), and has taught at the University of Southern Denmark.
Allegra’s practice has been recognized with numerous major awards. They received the Burke Prize from the Museum of Arts and Design in 2019—one of the most prestigious honors in contemporary craft—as well as a United States Artists Award in 2022. Other honors include a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation (2019), an Artadia Award (2018), a MAP Fund grant (2018), a Mike Kelley Foundation Artist Project Grant (2018), a Tosa Studio Award (2018), a Windgate Craft Fellowship (2015), and the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award from the San Francisco Foundation (2014).
Allegra makes work concerned with memorial, social tension, and the body. Working across performative craft, poetry, dance, weaving, sculpture, assemblage, and site-specific installation, their practice asks how loss is held in material form and how communities survive grief. Using the ideology and methodology of weaving, Allegra explores the intersections of forces—material, social, and emotional—often activating looms and weaving tools through movement and dance, with their body serving as the metaphorical thread. Writing runs through their art practice as a continuous strand: their writing has appeared in American Craft, Art Journal, Foglifter, Cream City Review, HYSTERIA Magazine, make/shift, and Yellow Medicine Review, among others. Their book Blackout was published by Sming Sming Books (2017). Their work has been anthologized in Dear Sister, Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, and Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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