Regina Agu: Shore|Lines

Jan 23–May 17, 2025

Regina Agu. Passage, 2019. Digital print on Samba Opaque, 4 panels total dimension 100 ft x 6 ft. Image courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Photography by Roman Alokhin.

About the Exhibition

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

Using methods of field work, landscape photography, and oral history, her work examines waterways and natural environments as defining sites of Black life and belonging.

Agu has grounded her investigation in close conversation with more than 30 Chicagoland and Great Lakes Region environmental advocates and ecologists of color, community historians and academics, sailing clubs, librarians, archivists, geographers, and the many native and migrant, families that live and work along these long-storied bodies of water. The exhibition includes a documentation text which Agu refers to as a “field guide,” connecting her Midwest and Gulf South explorations, in a form available as a take-home compilation of her visual work.

Through extended, sustained engagement, Shore|Lines is proud to bring together discourses of Black geographies and landscape photography, using the methodology of landscape panorama as a format for relating ideas and themes of Black cultural memory connected to place.

Of particular attribution to her large-scale commission and newest work (2024), Agu uniquely explores and documents a nuanced assemblage of sociocultural geographies that connect to the past century’s Great Migration in a way that is rarely considered within the wider visual lore or heritage narrative of the Great Lakes.

Organized by Asha Iman Veal, MoCP Associate Curator.

Exhibition on view January 23-May 18, 2025.

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.