If you talk to the artist Faheem Majeed for more than a few minutes, it’s likely that he’ll mention the South Side Community Art Center, the storied cultural institution where he served as executive director from 2005 to 2011. In some ways, he’s never left, as his art practice continues to explore the institution’s legacy and contemporary significance. It has certainly never left him.
Allison Peters Quinn, the director of exhibitions at HPAC, curated the show, and chose to include smaller examples of earlier rubbings Majeed has done. A series of twelve 13-by-13-inch rubbings of Majeed’s cedar planks, mounted in a grid, are full of detail: loose threads become dark lines, a nail is captured in full, a knot in the wood looks like a radiating flower.
“Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shrouds”
Through July 24, appointment only, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org, free.
Push Pull with The Seldoms
Thu 6/10, 6 PM and Sat 6/12, 2 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org, free.
In high school, Majeed identified as an athlete. Though he took art classes and excelled in them, he didn’t take them seriously. It wasn’t until an art teacher, Mr. Wald, took one of Majeed’s paintings, without his permission, and sold it at an art fair, that Majeed realized art might be his calling. The painting illustrated a Yoruba creation myth, where a chicken scratches at and scatters the dirt between its claws, creating the Earth. “Something about putting the money in my hand, I realized something that was probably going to end up in the trash was worth something,” Majeed says. “That was the moment I realized work and passion could be one.”
He was often called the next Richard Hunt, a prominent metal sculptor, also based in Chicago, who has more than 100 public works installed across the country. One of Hunt’s steel sculptures, Symbiosis, is on the campus of Howard University.
Majeed couldn’t understand it. Then he thought about where she learned printmaking, among activist artists at Mexico City’s Taller de Gráfica Popular who used the accessible medium to advance radical social causes. A Xerox achieved that aim even faster than printmaking could.
While he was acting executive director of SSCAC, he decided to go to grad school. “I thought it could somehow break me into a room or a space that I, nor anyone that I was working with at the Center, was a part of,” he says. Places like the MCA or the Renaissance Society were not on his radar. “I felt like there were conversations happening over there, wherever over there was. On the other side of a wall, and I could not see over it. I couldn’t get through it, I couldn’t engage.”
