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Regina Agu (born 1981) is an American visual artist and writer, based in Chicago, Illinois. Among other themes, her work explores the relationships between history, memory, landscape, and representation, particularly as they concern communities of color. Recognition for her work has included a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, a 2017 Artadia Award, and a feature article in the Spring 2022 issue of Panorama, the official journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Biography
Regina Agu was born in Houston to a Louisiana-born American mother and a Nigerian father. Through her father, she is of Igbo descent. Her childhood was spent in multiple countries, including Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, and Switzerland, as her father worked for the United Nations World Health Organization as a public health epidemiologist. Agu began creating art as a child, following her first exposure to drawing and painting through her mother’s artwork and textbooks.

She received a Bachelor of Science in Policy Analysis and Management from Cornell University in 2003, with a professional interest in working in community development. She then returned to Houston, where she subsequently began to exhibit her visual and written works.

Agu graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. As of 2021, she was living and working in Chicago, Illinois.

Career and accomplishments
Agu’s multimedia work has produced “texts, photographs, and drawings, in addition to installations, performances, and collaborative public projects.” It “has been included in exhibitions, public readings, and performances nationally.”

In 2011, she was selected as an associate artist-in-residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach. Her experimental text “Index, With and for: ‘Black Mo’nin’,’ by Fred Moten” was included in the Project Row Houses publication Book Club Book that year. She both participated in a group installation and had her own installation exhibited in Project Row Houses’ Round 35 event.

In 2012, Agu’s exhibition Visible Unseen was hosted at Fresh Arts, followed in 2013 by Nerve Endings at Lawndale Art Center, both in her native Houston.

Her book On | Off was published through Book Machine Houston in 2014.

In 2015, she published A Living Index, an experimental index of over 600 books in the Elsewhere Living Library collection (accompanied by photographs), through paratext: an independent small press that she had co-founded. That year, she was selected as a Southern Constellations Fellow and artist-in-residence at the Elsewhere museum in Greensboro, North Carolina.

In 2016, Alabama Song, the Houston-based collaboratively-run art space of which Agu served as co-director from 2014-2017, was awarded a three-year SEED grant by The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

Her exhibition Sea Change was hosted at the Galveston Arts Center in 2017. In addition, her work was recognized with an Artadia Houston award that year, and she was also chosen as one of the Lawndale Artist Studio Program’s residents.

In 2018, she was selected as artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans and also for the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts-Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston. The latter fellowship allowed her to serve as a mentor for local art university students through the Project Row Houses Summer Studios program.

Agu’s first solo museum installation, Passage, was hosted at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) from November 2019 through February 2020. The museum’s website describes Passage as “an immersive, site-specific installation…[that] weaves together imagery of waterways from across Louisiana to consider how the landscapes, people, and histories of the region are connected by and through water.” The installation was created as a part of her artist residency at A Studio in the Woods.

In 2022, she was selected as a Radicle Studio artist-in-residence for the tenth iteration of Hyde Park Art Center’s Jackman Goldwasser Residency.

Agu’s oeuvre was the focus of an article by art history professor and curator Allison K. Young that appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Panorama: the peer-reviewed, academic journal of the Association of Historians of American Art.

Artistic practice
Agu has stated, “I’m really interested in looking at the intersection between memory and history, which influences the majority of my work.” More specifically, she has commented, “I am interested in mapping the collective memories left behind in historic spaces and architecture.” In the latter half of the 2010s, her work has been noted to explore, “language, history, and representation…as they coalesce in contemporary ideas around landscape.” She has incorporated “a variety of tactics drawn from critical geography, conceptual writing, and poetry.” A 2019 feature on her contributions to the In Place exhibition at Midland College’s McCormick Gallery described her pieces as “alluring and subtly subversive,” while “seeking to tell stories that have been otherwise suppressed.”

Her process “involves research and explorations of [archives and of] ‘site,’ including histories and theories of landscape photography, architecture, the built environment, the landscape, environmental justice, and spatial politics – particularly their intersections around communities of color.”

In a 2017 feature on Africanah.org, Agu noted that her exposure to diverse cultural experiences during her upbringing has influenced her practice and that she felt a strong connection to African culture, in particular.

The collaborative nature of many of Agu’s projects has also received comment, and she stated in 2017 that she views her practice as part of “a lineage of art-making.” Further, in 2018 she stated, “It is important to me to be involved in community-based work where I am able to make meaningful contributions of time and resources in support of my peers…”

In her article “Visuality and the Plantationocene: The Panoramas of Regina Agu,” Allison K. Young examines the artist’s body of work, particularly the 2017 exhibition Sea Change and the 2019-2020 installation Passage. Young analyzes these pieces through the lens of Plantationocene geohistorical discourse.

Selected exhibitions

 * 2011 – Museum as Hub: Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet – [New Museum]], New York
 * 2011 – Round 35 – Project Row Houses, Houston
 * 2012 – Visible Unseen – Fresh Arts, Houston
 * 2013 – Coming Thru the Gap in the Mountain on an Elephant – University Museum at Texas Southern University, Houston
 * 2013 – palimpsest – Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, Miami
 * 2013-2014 – Nerve Endings – Lawndale Art Center, Houston
 * 2016 – Friendly Fire – Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston
 * 2016 – Open Session 9: Cartography of Ghosts – Drawing Center, New York
 * 2016 – Round 45 – Project Row Houses, Houston
 * 2016 – Southern Constellations – American University Museum Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C.
 * 2017 – How Do I Say Her Name? – Art League Houston, Houston
 * 2017 – into the midst of things – DiverseWorks, Houston
 * 2017 – Sea Change – Galveston Arts Center, Galveston
 * 2017 – Where Do We Stand'?  – Drawing Center, New York
 * 2018 – In Real Life – Lawndale Art Center, Houston
 * 2018 – Silos – Art League Houston, Houston
 * 2019 – New Monuments for New Cities – High Line Network Joint Art Initiative, New York
 * 2019-2020 – Passage – New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans
 * 2021 – Atlanta Biennial: Of Care and Destruction – Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta
 * 2021 – Still Life – The Franklin, Chicago
 * 2021 – Texas Biennial: A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon – FotoFest, Houston

Awards and recognition

 * Creative Capital Master Class Award, 2012
 * Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant - Emerging, 2012
 * Idea Fund Grant, 2014
 * Robert Rauschenberg Foundation SEED Grant, 2016
 * Artadia Houston Award, 2017
 * Houston Arts Alliance Support for Artists and Creative Individuals Grant – Multidisciplinary, 2018

Books

 * 2011 Jemison, Steffani, ed. Book Club Book. Houston: Project Row Houses, 2011.
 * 2014 Agu, Regina. On | Off. Paris: one star press, 2014.
 * 2015 Agu, Regina. A Living Index. Houston: paratext, 2015.