Multidisciplinary Artist Indira Allegra visits campus

The School of Art, Design and Art History and the College of Visual and Performing Arts welcomed Multidisciplinary Artist Indira Allegra to campus to serve as the Spring 2025 D. Liskey-Wampler Art Professorship and Cultural Connections Artist-In-Residence, February 3–7, 2025. Professor of Art, R. Mertens hosted Allegra’s visit. From their exhibition at the Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art to collaborations with students and the community, their visit offered several opportunities for the JMU and Harrisonburg communities to engage with Allegra.

Allegra’s first visit to campus was in Fall 2022, when the artist met with graduate art students and dance students to begin developing ideas for an exhibition in Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art. Allegra (they/them)then came back to campus in Fall 2024 to meet with fiber arts students and School of Music students to develop experimental music for amplified floor looms.

In early January 2025, Allegra arrived in Harrisonburg from New York city to devise dance, music and performance art with M.F.A. alumni, undergraduate students, local artists and local Mennonite community members.

Throughout this five-day residency, Allegra video-recorded performances along Blacks Run in Harrisonburg.

Music students Will Shanahan and Mikayla Lao collaborated with Allegra to compose original music for the looms. Additionally, Allegra worked with M.F.A. alumni M. Greenwald, Jon Henry, dance students Lauren Clingenpeel, Zada Sudduth, and local community members Richard Waddingham and Regina Cyzick Harlow to create an immersive video and sound exhibition for the gallery.

They met with six classes during their residency, including Music, Dance, Art, Creative Writing, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and an experimental IART course called “Time and Art: Theory and Practice in Time for Interdisciplinary Collaboration”.

After Allegra’s Wampler presentation, they hosted a panel discussion with some of the performers and presented a performance on amplified looms with students from an advanced fiber art course. The performance was inspired by Shape Note singing, “Sacred Harp,” which is still practiced in the Harrisonburg Mennonite community.

“Black’s Run, often overlooked for its polluted past, weaves its way through the body of Harrisonburg like a weaver’s thread- sometimes visible on the surface and sometimes hidden underneath-but at all times binding the cloth of the city together. In freshwater hymns / rituals of becoming, the voice of this humble stream offers a ritual pathway for us to follow into a brilliant dream of who we are becoming. The creation of a new kind of instrument- an electric weaver’s harp- transforms the historical tensions surrounding this thread of a waterway into music. -Indira Allegra

The Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art exhibition featured five wall-sized video projections of the collaborative performances along Blacks Run with four amplified floor looms. On March 4 an exhibition closing event included the live performance of the music students’ original scores for amplified loom as well as a restaged performance of fiber art students from the opening night.  “I loved how the artist mixed their work with other communities of creative design, like coding. I also liked the many different ways they incorporated their art and displayed it, as well as the true emotion that you can tell was put behind the pieces,” shared an art student.

Allegra's artwork is a perfect example of interdisciplinary arts, bringing together dance, music, creative writing, art, design and more.

The exhibition ran February 4–March 7, 2025, with a reception on February 4 from 5–8 pm and closing reception on March 4 5-7 pm.

Allegra led workshops and inspired community rehabilitation, presenting an example of interdisciplinary arts for students and faculty through the Cultural Connections Residence Program. The program aims to bring diversity, in all its forms, to the JMU campus and to provide opportunities for students to engage with artists from multiple disciplines. CCRP was established in 2007–2008 as a collaboration between Inclusion at JMU and the College of Visual and Performing Arts. The Office of the Special Assistant to the President for Diversity and the CVPA Council for Inclusive Excellence encourage proposals that enhance the diversity of thought, perspective, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic status and background, gender, sexual orientation, and cultural experiences.

Allegra is a conceptual artist and founder of Cazimi Studio, which uses weaving as a framework to transform tension within different sites creatively. The studio is unique in its emphasis on performance, publication, and the integration of spiritual care as preferred design solutions.

Allegra's work has been featured in exhibitions at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY); Blaffer Museum (Houston, TX), Center for Craft Creativity and Design (Asheville, NC); the Museum of the African Diaspora (San Francisco, CA) and San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, CA) among others.

Allegra is 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, and Leonardo, among others. Allegra is 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.