Indira Allegra: May the hope of my heart be woven into the waters

In partnership with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and KADIST 

Date:

Friday, January 17, 2024 | 2pm-3pm

Location:

Blaffer Art Museum

Format:

2:00 pm, First Performance  

2:30 pm, Second Performance 

2:50pm, Artist Q&A and Talkback with Tony Valle (Professor of Practice, Dance, School of Theatre & Dance) 

This new site-specific work by Indira Allegra (b. 1980, Detroit, MI, USA. Lives and works in New York, NY, USA) is created in collaboration with Houston-based musicians, cellist Austin Lewellen, artist and engineer Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr., with fabrication by MoonPapas. The artists transform the museum stairwell and turn various architectural features into instruments: the open space as a site of ascension as the stairs are transformed into a theremin. Through activating the work and scheduled live sound sessions, Allegra and collaborators weave the senses of touch and hearing, into collective intimacy, memory, and grief.

Visitors are encouraged to pick up a reed prayer wand before ascending, weaving themselves into the musical samples, and place the wand into the fountain at the top of the stairs. The artist will activate the stairwell through performances over the course of the exhibition.

At the partner venue KADIST San Francisco, Allegra will broadcast the sound recordings of the Blaffer Sessions at the entrance and exit of the gallery space. Also on view there is Allegra’s video After My Death/A Mutable Decision (2022), which follows the artist’s movement within a shaft of sunlight in an empty studio during pandemic lockdown, culminating in a staccato of grief expressions.

About the Artist

Indira Allegra is a conceptual artist and founder of Cazimi Studio. Cazimi Studio uses weaving as a framework to creatively transform tension within different sites. The studio is unique in its emphasis on performance, publication and the integration of spiritual care as preferred design solutions. Thinking as a poet, threads of connection are discovered between seemingly disparate experiences. Moving as a weaver, these connections are interlaced into a greater whole.

Allegra’s work has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Art Journal, BOMB Magazine, SF Chronicle, e-flux, All Arts and ARTFORUM and in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, TX), Center for Craft Creativity and Design (Asheville, NC); John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI); Gray Area (San Francisco, CA); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA) and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, CA) among others.

Allegra is the author of Tension Studies and Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness (Sming Sming Books). Their writing has been featured in Theater, TEXTILE: Cloth and Culture, American Craft Magazine, Panorama Journal, Leonardo and Material Intelligence among others. Their monograph Blackout (Sming Sming Books) is in the collection of major art museum libraries nationwide. Allegra has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Burke Prize, Creative Capital, United States Artists Fellowship, Gerbode Choreographer Award, Art Matters Fellowship and CripTech Metaverse Fellowship. cazimistudio.space | @indiraallegrastudio

Photo courtesy: Jennifer Bootwala