SHOOP COLLECTIVE BIOGRAPHY
Shoop is a collective of five US-based Black women artists dedicated to performance, installation, and communal healing across the world. The principal members met for the first time while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The residency in Nawat Fes will be their first time working internationally to produce collaborative sound and installation works. The name of the collective is inspired by songs using the unintelligible word “Shoop.”
Biography
Regina Agu
Regina Agu was born in Houston, Texas and raised between the United States, Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Switzerland, and South Africa. Her research-based practice spans photography, drawing, installation, performance, text, and work in the public sphere. Her work has been supported by an Artadia Houston award, grants from Houston Arts Alliance, The Idea Fund, and the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts + Project Row Houses fellowship at the University of Houston for her research project, A Psychogeography of Emancipation Park. She has attended residencies at the Joan Mitchell Center, A Studio in the Woods, The Drawing Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others. From 2014-2017, Agu was the co-director of Alabama Song, a collaboratively-run art space in Houston, which received a 2016 SEED grant from The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. Regina is the founder of the Houston-based WOC Reading Group, and her collaborative projects include Friends of Angela Davis Park.
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Biography
Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB)
Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an “undisciplinary” artist-scholar exploring how aesthetics can enact radical thought beyond mere representation. Creating visually poetic and emotionally engaging artworks with a deeply critical eye towards knowledge, medium and audience, RMB’s work blends installation design, photography, performance, writing, video, and filmmaking with the implementation and critique of power structures. These works have been presented at galleries internationally including 1:1, Basel; Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; Malmö Konstmuseum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Rhodes College, Memphis; Tate Modern, London; and Turbine Hall, Johannesburg. Born in Toledo, Ohio, RMB is a lifelong nomad who has moved 24 times and holds degrees from Yale University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Northwestern University.
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Biography
Tavia David
Tavia David is an interdisciplinary artist who activates themes of critical theory surrounding black displacement and generational real-estate disparagement. Through installations, digital media, performance, and sculpture, she investigates components of ghetto landscape and the subsets of cultural epithets that ensue. Passionate about the historical lineage of the intricacies of exploited communities, she explores how architecture, language, and material shape ongoing socio-economic climates. Born in the Austin community of Chicago’s Westside, she earned a BFA in Studio Practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently lives and works on the Westside of Chicago, engaging in work geared toward identifying and healing inequity.
Biography
Leah Ra’chel Gipson
Leah Ra’chel Gipson is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar who facilitates hyperlocal, community projects that engage Black culture and imagines critical “call and response” environments. Her work explores race and gender through family history, popular media, and archives using image, sound, textile, and installation, rooted in mixed traditions of Black feminism and Black church. Leah received her MA in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her MTS at McCormick Theological Seminary, and her BFA from the University of Central Florida. She is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a faculty member at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy Chicago. Her work has been featured at the South Side Community Art Center, Jane Addams Hull House Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Project Row Houses.
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Biography
Jamila Raegan
Jamila Raegan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses inequity and violence, a marker of her personal and cultural experiences. She most often creates sculptures and environments to provide a space for mourning and collective healing. Her practice is material-centered, which includes: familial relationships, ancestors, hybrid belief systems, plant cultivation, and preservation through sculpture, performance, and installation. Jamila studied photography and Pan-African Studies at the University of Louisville and later served as a founding board member and arts educator at Extreme Kids and Crew, a not-for-profit arts organization for children and families with special needs in New York City. She completed her BFA in Studio Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. Currently residing in Brooklyn, New York, she has focused more recently on film and video work, collaboration, and painting.
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