Coco Allred’s role as an educator is central to her art practice. She aims to recontextualize pedagogical histories, employ learning strategies for kinship, and satirize narratives of solo genius. Applying this framework to design, she creates sculpturally rooted public installations using co-design methodologies. Projects take multiple forms, utilizing sculpture to establish a sense of place, programming to engage participants, and publication to share collaborative processes. Coco explores the values and histories embedded in the design of her surrounding environment to craft furniture, objects, and prints as props, suggesting new possibilities for these scenes.
Making collaborative public projects focused on creating alternative spaces for learning and convening, she created Drawing Herd, a mobile installation and site-specific workshop series in Washington State, and collaborated on a pop-up art gallery for a K-8 school in Jersey City. In 2023, she was a resident at Fabrica, in Treviso, Italy. She has spent time as an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop Museum in Philadelphia, PA, and as a Work Trade Residency at A-Z West in Joshua Tree, CA. Her work has received support from various cities in King County, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the YoungArts Foundation, and an inaugural Leading with Creativity grant from Anthropologie. She is a member of the collective, Post-Novis. Coco has a BFA program at Carnegie Mellon University with a concentration in Sculpture and a minor in Human-Computer Interaction. Coco is from Seattle, Washington and currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusets where she is pursuing a Masters of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology within the School of Architecture at MIT.