Indira Allegra selected for TOSA AWARD

1240 Minnesota Street
Minnesota Street Project Studios
5 min readMay 17, 2018

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Now in it’s third year — The Tosa Studio Award recognizes a San Francisco Bay Area artist, offering financial support and a studio space to help establish and further an arts career.

Indria Allegra will be in residence at Minnesota Street Project Artist Studios July 2018— July 2019

Allegra was selected from a pool of finalists including:
Leonie Guyer
Amy Ho
Sophie Ramos
May Wilson

The jury for this year’s award consisted of:
Kevin Chen; Artist, Curator, Administrator, Educator
Apsara DiQuinzio; Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Phyllis C. Wattis |MATRIX Curator, BAMPFA,
Katrina Traywick; Director/Owner Traywick Contemporary

Indira Allegra — Woven Account, 2013. Newsprint detailing instances and sites of hate violence against LGBTQ2S people, cotton, linen paper, 55” x 36” x .75"

A conversation with Indira Allegra:

Your process is fluid, including exploration in varying histories, trauma, and physical and emotional forms — in the end, what unifies your practice?

Work with tension as creative material. An obsession with unseen forces. I use text/ile production to shuttle between social intervention, memorial and an obsession with unseen forces like memory, haunting and emotions born from trauma. I think of weaving as the crossing of any two forces held under tension, this allows me to work with tension as material in physical, social and emotional forms.

Indira Allegra — Bodywarp: Decommissioning VIII, 2017. Archival print, 20" x 24"

Do you view your practice (no matter the specific medium) as performative? The viewer is often invited into an experience when being encountered by your work — how does your sculptural work and writing inform this experience?

Yes. Poetry is born from orality and the production of all objects and environments is born from the durational performance of the artist.

Indira Allegra — Toys and Tools (Detail), 2017. Wood, steel, aluminum, hemp, lead, leather, 72" x 66" x 18"

You have had a significant amount of movement between short term residencies in recent years, how has this informed your practice and how do you envision your year-long residency with TOSA influencing this trajectory?

I have been moving between disparate workspaces (when available) for a decade. Recent residencies afforded me the space to be able to create more movement-based work which I had harbored a desire to do for *years* but did not have the square footage to explore. A year-long residency at TOSA will allow me to share more of my research, improvisation and inquiry with more people. It is my hope that this will open more opportunities for exhibition and collaboration. I am looking forward to having time and space to make works that require even deeper dives conceptually, slow unfolding and space to spill.

Indira Allegra — Lineage V, 2017. Wood, steel, 4" x 4" x 36"

1240 Minnesota Street provides an environment that compliments your layered process, will the open floorplan and your integration within the community affect how you approach the work you make this upcoming year? How?

My training as a poet allows for me to make connections between people, objects and environments that others are hesitant to wait for or witness. I feel my body is an open floorplan — listening for impulses from my brain, waiting for information from my hands, curious about the meaning that my heart is beating out. Such porosity affords me the privilege of exploration in a world dominated by google’s autofill, amazon’s suggestions and waze’s direction. I cannot begin to know how the open floorplan will impact the work — only that I will be more connected to other artists during this period of making than ever before. I no longer have to work in relative isolation. I can ask for help when I need it of the Adobe and MSP Writer’s Residency. I can move some technical ideas forward and finish my manuscript finally. I can spend a year building badly needed infrastructure for my practice. I can ask other MSP artists about their strategies for being #artistsatwork. For this I am grateful. Ultimately, all work is born from the performance of relationship — between the artist and their tools and materials and between the artist and the beings composing their quotidian life.

Indira Allegra — Counting Games: Submission to Studio Erotics, 2017. 13' x 20" x 50"

About the Tosa Studio Award:

Sponsored by Victoria Belco and William Goodman, the award will annually provide a promising artist a $10,000 stipend and use of a private studio at 1240 Minnesota Street in the Minnesota Street Project studio building for the award period, with access to the Minnesota Street Project facilities and participation in the creative community.

About Indira Allegra:

Indira Allegra is a performance artist, sculptor and writer. She uses text/ile production to shuttle between social practice, memorial and an obsession with unseen forces like memory, haunting and emotions born from trauma. Allegra conceives of weaving as the crossing of any two forces held under tension and is curious to explore how this ancient technology can offer contemporary insights into human patterns. She works with tension as creative material in physical, social, and emotional forms.

Allegra has been honored with the Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant, Jackson Literary Award, Lambda Literary Fellowship, and Windgate Craft Fellowship. Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 4 and Surface Design Magazine. Her commissions include works for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland, and SFJAZZ Poetry Festival. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at The Arts Incubator in Chicago, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Catharine Clark Gallery, Weinberg/Newton and The Alice Gallery among others. She has screened works at the Seattle Art Museum, MIX NYC, Bologna Lesbian Film Festival and Outfest Fusion.

Indira’s writing has been widely anthologized, and she has contributed works to Foglifter Magazine, Cream City Review, HYSTERIA Magazine, make/shift Magazine, and Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art and Thought, among others. She has been a visiting artist at Southern Denmark University and is a former Shelly Osborne visiting artist at UC Berkeley and Art + Process + Ideas Visiting Artist at Mills College.

Indira Allegra — 32 Harnesses Controlled by a Switch (Detail), 2014. Calfskin leather, hand dyed silk, thread, 92" x 5.5" x .25"

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