Indira Allegra 'May the Hope of My Heart Be Woven into the Waters' (2024)
KADIST and the Blaffer Art Museum present a new commission by Indira Allegra at the Blaffer Art Museum.
Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum features a new commission of Indira Allegra titled May the Hope of My Heart Be Woven into the Waters (2024). With Houston-based collaborators, cellist Austin Lewellen, artist and engineer Corey De’Juan Sherrard Jr., and fabrication studio Moon Papas, Allegra transforms the open space of the museum stairwell into a contemporary theremin, each stair offering a unique sound from harp-like plucking to the droning resonance of a cello. Through live sessions, a duet of Lewellen’s cello and Allegra’s movement-trigger sounds, as the artist transports the audience’s prayers through reed wands from the bottom of the stairs to the water fountain at the top. As an offering that weaves the senses of touch and hearing into a collective intimacy, memory, and grief, museum visitors’ movements generate their own score throughout the span of the exhibition. During the course of the concurrent exhibition at KADIST San Francisco, the sound recording of the first live session is broadcast at the entrance beginning in November 2024, providing a link between the two exhibition venues.
Session 1: Friday, October 11, 2024, 6–8 pm
Sessions 2 and 3: Friday, January 17, 2025, 2–4 pm
May the Hope of My Heart Be Woven into the Waters is co-commissioned by the Blaffer Art Museum, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston, and KADIST.
Learn more about Makeshift Memorials, Small Revolutions at the Blaffer Art Museum
Indira Allegra (Born 1980, USA. Lives in New York, NY, USA) uses text and textile production—a combined material they designate as a “text/ile”—to embody unseen forces like memory, haunting, grief, and emotions born from trauma. Toni Morrison has written that “invisible things are not necessarily not-there,” and it is in this space of not-thereness that Allegra’s work resides. Their practice explores how the ancient technology of weaving can offer contemporary insights into human patterns. Their weavings, photographs, installations, performances, videos, and writing are often site-responsive, incorporating the tensions of the spaces, materials, and objects they encounter. For Allegra, each of these things is alive with memory and functions as a collaborator in the art-making process. The artist’s projects reveal and center the histories and experiences, often violent or traumatic, of people and places that have been rendered invisible. Allegra’s practice expresses that which haunts us as a society locally and globally: the history of gay-bashings in San Francisco, police violence, suicide, public lynchings, exile, and physical ailments and disability. Their work also seeks to recuperate grief as a collective act, a shift that might relieve some of the burden suffered by the bodies and materials that act as containers for these histories.
Founded in 1973, the Blaffer Art Museum endeavors to further the understanding of contemporary art through exhibitions, publications, and public programs. As the gateway between the University of Houston’s Central campus and the City of Houston, Blaffer Art Museum is a catalyst for creative innovation, experimentation, and scholarship. Its exhibitions and programs are free and open to the public, create community through dialogue and participation, and inspire an appreciation for the visual arts as a vital force in shaping contemporary culture.
The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston is the interdisciplinary arts resource for students, faculty and staff, and the general public. In order to bridge disciplines, stimulate dialogue and support the creation of innovative work, the Mitchell Center supports a variety of programs such as lectures and workshops, performances and exhibitions, scholarships, residencies and visiting artists.