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Photo by Timothy Schenck

Faheem Majeed

Freedom’s Stand

September 2022 – February 2024
Location

On the High Line at 30th Street

Faheem Majeed is an artist, educator, curator, and community facilitator. In 2016, Majeed founded the Floating Museum, an art collective that creates new models for exploring relationships between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. He has also been the Executive Director and Curator for the South Side Community Art Center, the oldest African American art center in the US. Majeed blends his experience as an artist, non-profit administrator, and curator to create artworks focused on institutional critique; his exhibitions leverage collaboration to promote meaningful dialogue among his immediate community, as well as a broader one. In his sculptural practice, Majeed often makes portraits of specific places: through rubbings of walls, floors, or even farm fields. In some cases he recreates the cultural spaces where he works as an administrator. He stages events, performances, and conversations within his installations, balancing between creating art objects and platforms for new cultural experiences.

For the High Line, Majeed presents Freedom’s Stand, an homage to the role of Black newspapers in the US. The work draws inspiration from a range of influential, community-driven work, including Chicago’s Wall of Respect and the Community Mural Movement, and emphasizes the importance of community-generated news and self-representation. Freedom’s Stand is named after Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned-and-operated newspaper in New York City, founded in 1827, which offered a counter-narrative to newspapers that attacked African Americans and encouraged slavery. The sculpture is modeled on the Dogon granaries of West Mali. The walls of the sculpture showcase headlines, articles, photographs, and advertisements from historical and contemporary Black newspapers, such as the ongoing South Shore Current in Chicago; these selections rotate monthly.

Organized by Melanie Kress, Curator of High Line Art.

Watch a recent San Francisco Public Library talk with Majeed where he and his research assistant, Shola Jimoh, delve into the inspiration and the archival research behind his artwork for the High Line.

Artist bio

Faheem Majeed (b. 1976, Chicago, Illinois) lives and works in Chicago. Majeed has presented solo exhibitions at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, Illinois (2020); South Side Community Art Center, Chicago (2020); Corvus Gallery, University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, Chicago (2019); SMFA at Tufts University, Boston, Massachussetts (2019); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2015). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions including Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2017); DuSable Museum, Chicago (2017); P!, New York, New York (2017); and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2016). Majeed has received The Field and MacArthur Foundation’s Leaders for a New Chicago Award (2020), Joyce Foundation Award (2020), the Harpo Foundation Award (2016), and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015).


Support

Lead support for High Line Art comes from Amanda and Don Mullen.

Major support is provided by Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip E. Aarons, The Brown Foundation Inc., and Charina Endowment Fund.

Program support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

High Line Art is supported, in part, with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the New York City Council, under the leadership of Speaker Adrienne Adams.