Jan 30th 2025

Regina Agu: Shore|Lines

@ Museum of Contemporary Photography

600 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605

Opening Thursday, January 30th, from 5:30PM - 7:30PM

On view through Saturday, May 17th

For Shore|Lines, Chicago-based artist Regina Agu (b. Houston, Texas) presents a large-scale panoramic installation at the Museum of Contemporary Photography as part of an exploration of placemaking and community memory—tracing sites and legacies of historical Black North American migration through an expansive tradition of the panoramic form. This Joyce Foundation Award (2023) special project and collaboration, focuses on connecting the landscapes, materiality, and human histories of the Gulf South region to the Great Lakes.

Drawing on methods of field work and landscape photography, Shore|Lines examines waterways and natural environments as defining sites of Black life and belonging.

This investigation grounds itself in close conversation with Chicago-area land and Great Lakes region environmental advocates and ecologists of color—community historians and academics, members of sailing clubs, librarians, archivists, geographers, and families that live and work along these long-storied bodies of water. The exhibition includes an artist book” documentation that Agu refers to as a “field guide,” connecting her Midwest and Gulf South experiences of the landscapes.

Shore|Lines is proud to bring together discourses of Black geographies, landscape photography, and site-specific land histories, using the methodology of landscape panorama as a format for relating ideas and themes of Black cultural memory connected to place.

This project uniquely explores and documents a nuanced assemblage of sociocultural geographies and cultures that connect to the Great Migration of the 20th century, in a way that is rarely considered within the wider visual lore or heritage narrative of the Great Lakes.

Asha Iman Veal, MoCP Associate Curator.

Exhibition on view January 23-May 17, 2025.

ARTIST BIO: Regina Agu (American, b. Houston) is a visual artist, writer, and researcher based in Chicago, IL. Agu was raised between the United States, the Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland. Her interdisciplinary practice includes conceptual and material inquiries into memory, history, representation, and Black geographies. Her work has been exhibited at the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Museum, The Drawing Center, the High Line, Project Row Houses, FotoFest, the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, among other venues. Agu is a 2023 Joyce Award winner with the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Agu has received an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, a SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts and Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project Friends of Emancipation Park. Agu holds a BS from Cornell University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Shore|Lines is supported by the Joyce Foundation through the 2023 Joyce Awards to Regina Agu and MoCP along with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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