Faheem Majeed is a Chicago-based artist, educator, curator, and community facilitator whose work considers how value is assigned to materials, histories, places, and cultural institutions. Working across sculpture, installation, architecture, and collaborative public projects, Majeed often begins with what is already there, particularly things that have been overlooked, discarded, or considered to have little value: particle board, scrap metal, discarded signs, billboard remnants, vacant spaces, and the histories embedded within them. Through reuse and transformation, these materials become vehicles for examining memory, labor, civic life, institutional power, and care.

Chicago’s South Side is central to Majeed’s life and practice. The South Side Community Art Center has been a particularly important presence. He served as the Center’s Executive Director from 2007 to 2011, and the historic institution remains a source of inquiry and inspiration throughout his studio practice. In ongoing bodies of work including Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden, Majeed draws from the architecture and material history of the Center while considering what it means to build, maintain, and care for cultural institutions across generations.

Majeed is also a founder and co-director of Floating Museum, a Chicago nonprofit arts collective that creates site-responsive projects exploring relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. Across both his individual and collaborative practices, he approaches cultural infrastructure not as something fixed, but as something continually shaped through participation, labor, experimentation, care, and collective stewardship.

His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, Malmö Konstmuseum, SMFA at Tufts, The High Line, and Hyde Park Art Center. His honors include the Field Foundation and MacArthur Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago Award, the Joyce Foundation Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and a Harpo Foundation Award. Majeed received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago.

Headshot Photo Credit: Eric Perez

Selected Works:

All of the Parts
In All of the Parts, Majeed explores questions of African diasporic identity, cultural inheritance, and the desire to reconnect with histories made fragmented or unknowable. Using traditional wood-carving techniques and materials including pine, cedar, wood stain, and shoe polish, the works isolate and reinterpret elements drawn from African masks, treating the fragment not as something incomplete but as a site for memory, inquiry, and connection.

Freedom’s Stand
Freedom’s Stand is a large-scale public sculpture honoring the history and continuing importance of Black newspapers in the United States. Inspired by both the form of the neighborhood newsstand and Dogon architecture of Mali, the work brings together nearly two centuries of Black media to consider self-representation, community-generated knowledge, and the role of the Black press in documenting American life.
Freedom’s Stand Photo credit: Lawrence Sumulong

Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden
Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden was an ongoing installation project that uses cedar panels modeled after the 1930s New Bauhaus wood paneling of the South Side Community Art Center’s Margaret Burroughs Gallery. Reconfigured over time as walls, floors, tables, chairs, and other structures, the panels retain the wear and traces of their previous uses, becoming physical records of institutional history, cultural labor, and continued care.

Chicago Works: Faheem Majeed
Produced in connection with Majeed’s 2015 Chicago Works exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the video offers an introduction to his practice and his transformation of everyday and discarded materials into sculptural forms. It situates that material language within his broader interest in Chicago’s South Side, community, institutional histories, and the systems through which objects and places are assigned value.

Faheem Majeed: Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden IV Exhibition Sneak Peek
This video introduces Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden, Majeed’s ongoing body of work rooted in the architectural and material history of the South Side Community Art Center. Through the repeated building, dismantling, and reuse of cedar panels modeled after the Center’s Margaret Burroughs Gallery, the project considers memory, maintenance, transformation, and the accumulated histories held within cultural spaces.