The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago presents South Shore Chicago artist Faheem Majeed’s first solo museum exhibition. His sculptural works are on view along with a room-sized installation—a new iteration of an ongoing project titled “Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden—in which the artist curates events and performances by inviting Chicago-based organizations and artists to inhabit the space with him. Majeed’s focus on a plurality of voices and cultural perspectives—collaborators include Donda’s House, the Chicago Home Theater Festival, and Avery R. Young—allows the exhibition to develop, expand, and accumulate organically over time. Organized by MCA Curatorial Assistant Steven L. Bridges, the exhibition is on view March 10 to August 16, 2015.

Faheem Majeed is a resident of the Chicago neighborhood South Shore, and he often looks to the material makeup of his surrounding neighborhood as an entry point to questions about civic-mindedness, community activism, and issues of racism. Majeed transforms devalued materials—particle board, scrap metal, wood, discarded signs and billboard remnants—and breathes new life into them through his creative process. His practice is also informed by his involvement as an arts administrator, curator, and community activist, all which feed into his larger practice.

Majeed is interested in how a space becomes a place, and how a place can become a type of home, and the works in the gallery are a staging ground for explorations of what the artist has termed “public domesticity.” In this exhibition, Majeed plans for issues around access and belonging to be explored, as well as the social and political boundaries that may work to thwart such identifications.

Faheem Majeed is a not-for-profit administrator, curator, and artist. He creates works that focus on institutional critique and exhibitions that leverage collaboration to engage his immediate, and the broader community, in meaningful dialogue. From 2005–2011, Majeed served as executive director and curator for the South Side Community Art Center. He was artist-in-residence for University of Chicago’s Arts in Public Life Initiative (2012), MANA Contemporary Chicago (2014), and Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2015). Majeed received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.