Regina Agu’s installation of Passage in NOMA’s Great Hall marks the first museum show for the contemporary artist. In a lecture sponsored by The Helis Foundation, Agu will discuss the environmental and historical themes in her creation of panoramas with Tia Simone-Gardner. Admission is free to all Louisiana residents on Wednesdays courtesy of The Helis Foundation.

Passage was created in partnership with A Studio in the Woods, through an artist residency.

ABOUT REGINA AGU

Regina Agu’s recent work investigates the complex relationships between the landscape and communities of color, with a special focus on the U.S. Gulf Coast region. Her practice employs a variety of tactics and theories drawn from black geographies, critical geography, conceptual writing, and poetry. Her research often involves site exploration and working with and through archives. Agu produces texts, photographs, and drawings, in addition to installations, performances, and collaborative public projects. Her work has been included in exhibitions, public readings, and performances nationally. In 2018, Agu was a Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellow at the University of Houston, a Lawndale Artist Studio Program resident, and was awarded a residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans through a partnership with For Freedoms. Agu received a 2017 Artadia Houston award and was a 2016-2017 Open Sessions participant at The Drawing Center. Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Third Ward, Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Agu is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her other collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park and the Houston-based independent small press paratext.

ABOUT TIA-SIMONE GARDNER

Tia-Simone Gardner is an artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar from Birmingham, Alabama. Her practice is interested interdisciplinary strategies that activate ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. Gardner participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist to a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. She is currently working on a project on Blackness and the Mississippi River as well as a photographic/writing project with her mother that addresses questions of biopolitics, Black memory and Indigineity by looking at the houses that the women in her family lived in the post-bellum South. Gardner currently lives in Minneapolis.