CHICAGO — During the Great Migration, more than six million Black people moved to the North and West of the United States, driven to escape the racial violence and oppression of the Jim Crow South. It stands to reason that artworks exploring such a monumental exodus might themselves take on immense forms.
Two opportunities to explore this convergence are currently on view in Chicago art institutions. Regina Agu: Shore|Lines at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MOCP) features Agu’s research into one particular beginning and endpoint of Black American migration: the Gulf South and Chicagoland. Simultaneously, the Cultural Center is showcasing A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, a traveling group exhibit that made several critics’ year-end lists when it debuted in 2022. The best artworks in both shows are enormous.
Shore|Lines is dominated by Agu’s room-size photographic panoramas, printed on fabric and hung like curtains. “Edge, Bank, Shore” is a 94-foot-long watery horizon pieced together from views of the Little Calumet River, a waterway central to 180 years of African-American history, and Lake Michigan, as seen from the historically Black neighborhood of Bronzeville. “Sea Change” spans 80 feet and surveys artificial sand dunes constructed to shield local beaches from algae and coastal erosion in Galveston, Texas, once the state’s largest city and the birthplace of Juneteenth. Big enough to feel immersive, pleasant enough to be welcoming, Agu’s panoramas are nevertheless not idyllic. Close looking reveals electric pylons, a gray skyline, trash cans, fencing, and parked cars; scenes composed of multiple layered images match up imperfectly; fabric folds deny the possibility of seeing all. Those pleats help the panoramas fit all kinds of spaces, both physically and conceptually: not all histories are welcome everywhere.
Some of what’s not visible in the panoramas is pictured in Field Notes, a series of 30 smaller prints that line the mezzanine gallery: the Hurricane Katrina Memorial in St. Bernard Parish; Chicago’s oldest Black-owned marina; the Underground Railroad site of Ton Farm; mud dredging in the Mississippi River Delta; the Chicago beach where, in 1961, Civil Rights demonstrators staged a “wade-in.” In seeking out these subjects, Agu conducted extensive research with the help of local environmental advocates, community historians, and ecologists of color, but without the MOCP’s informative wall texts, it would be difficult to recognize their importance to Black history and geography. Photographs can only tell part of a story. Perhaps in acknowledgement, Shore|Lines includes generous supplemental materials on the museum’s third floor. From the permanent collection is a selection of infrastructure and community images shot in and around Chicago’s waterways, while excerpts of holiday footage from Black Midwestern families enjoying the water in the 1920s and 1940s are on loan from the South Side Home Movie Project.
Agu, who was born in Houston but raised around the world, has lived and worked in Chicago since 2020. So the landscapes in Shore|Lines are personal, too. These high stakes recur in A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration. All 12 of the artists commissioned to make new work for that exhibition, as well as the show’s co-curators, come from families directly impacted by that history. They range from superstars Carrie Mae Weems and Mark Bradford to emerging artist Akea Brionne, who tenderly embroiders jacquard weavings based on old family photos.
Brionne’s textiles are large relative to their source material, but they are small compared to the rest of the works in Legacies. This is a monumental show in a monumental space, the Cultural Center’s 30-foot-tall, coffered, Renaissance- and Neoclassical-style fourth-floor galleries being some of the grandest in all of Chicago. Legacies more than holds its own here — indeed, it is difficult to imagine a better space for Torkwase Dyson’s mysterious quartet of black glass portals, joined by angular black steel tubes, looking like a sleek time machine whose dial has been set for a future of Black liberation. It is hard not to step inside.
Other standouts include Robert Pruitt’s “A Song for Travelers” (2022), a 20-foot-long imaginary family portrait that spans centuries. Drawn with rich, dark charcoal and conté, plus zingy flashes of pastel, the tableau reunites folks from many eras of Black life around one member whose alien garb suggests they are on their way to unimaginably distant lands. In Zoë Charlton’s even bigger drawing, a unification also occurs, not of people but of the places they’ve been. “Permanent Change of Station,” a sort of stage set constructed from giant drawings and cardboard cut-outs, positions her grandmother’s bright blue North Florida bungalow amid a forest of flowering trees, against a backdrop of terraced Southeast Asian rice fields, overlooking the White-only suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania, all of it overgrown with Spanish moss. At the crest of the mountain stands a high-ranking military woman, one of many service people in the artist’s extended family, her far-flung postings one explanation for the complexity of the geography on view.
Sometimes exhibitions and artworks talk to one another across a city. Shore|Lines and Legacies do this. When it happens, it’s good to listen. Especially now, when the Trump administration is hellbent on destroying DEI programs and, along with them, many advances in the understanding and recording of African-American history. Blink, and another webpage disappears, another grant gets cancelled. The Black geographies explored in these two exhibitions have always been there, but simply being there isn’t enough. Histories need to be unearthed, recorded, studied, intersected, sung, paraded, and learned. These two exhibitions do just that for the Great Migration, via the capacious purview of art making. See them, know them, and keep them coming.
Regina Agu: Shore|Lines continues at the Museum of Contemporary Photography (600 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through May 17. The exhibition was curated by MOCP Associate Curator Asha Iman Veal.
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration continues at the Chicago Cultural Center (78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois) through April 27. The exhibition was curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Jessica Bell Brown and was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art.