MoCP Exhibition: Regina Agu: Shore | Lines

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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

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