"Understanding that craft is an ongoing intergenerational learning process, changing material and approaches evolve, Allegra becomes the edge of that process. In fact, her work celebrates process, bolstering it as a supreme aspect of craft. This process is missing in American culture. Society is stripped of the knowledge of production and Allegra's work helps to restore that knowledge, to make us remember." —Cannupa Hanska Luger, 2018 Burke Prize Winner

The 2019 winner of the Museum’s Burke Prize, Indira Allegra returns to the Museum of Arts and Design for an interactive conversation with her friend and former teacher, artist Dario Robleto. Delving into Allegra’s investigation and reimagination of memorial, the pair will diverge from the traditional panel discussion format and invite the audience to contribute to the conversation. Artists and audience will investigate what memorial feels like, the scale on which it exists, and how remembrance functions through practices of performance, sculpture, and installation.

About the Artists

Indira Allegra is the 2019 Winner of the Museum's Burke Prize, which represents emerging voices expanding the disciplines at the core of the studio craft movement. Deeply informed by the ritual, relational, and performative aspects of weaving, Indira Allegra’s work is currently on view in the Museum's Burke Prize 2019 exhibition, and has been exhibited at The Arts Incubator in Chicago, John Michael Kholer Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Center for Craft Creativity and Design, and the Museum of the African Diaspora among others. Allegra's commissions include performances for SFMOMA, de Young Museum, The Wattis Institute, City of Oakland, and SFJAZZ Poetry Festival. Other honors include the Artadia Award, the Windgate Craft Fellowship, and the Jackson Literary Award.  A recipient of a Mike Kelley Artist Project Grant and MAP Fund, a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellow, and a triennial Montalvo Art Center Sally and Don Lucas Artist Fellow. Allegra teaches in the Graduate Art and Visual Culture Department at Mills College.

Dario Robleto lives and works in Houston, TX.  He has had numerous solo exhibitions since 1997, most recently at the McNay Museum, San Antonio, the Menil Collection, Houston, the New Orleans Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Notable group shows include Prospect 4: The Lotus In Spite of the Swamp, New Orleans; Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, MASS MoCA; Nouveau Festival 5th Edition, Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Record/Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art. He is currently serving as an Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering; Artist-at-Large at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and the Block Museum of Art; and as a Visiting Scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2016 he was appointed as the Texas State Artist Laureate.