august 22 – october 26, 2019 - tufts university

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August 22 – October 26, 2019

Grossman & Anderson Galleries at SMFA at Tufts

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Listen!In 1972 Ms. Elma Lewis wrote of taking a drive from Franklin Park in Roxbury, Massachusetts, down past Forest Hills, onto the VFW Parkway until she reached the Walpole-Norfolk prison, where she was on her way to the Elma Lewis Technical Training Theater Program at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI) Norfolk, a program that she founded in 1970. On the drive, she mused on the meandering route mirroring a set of choices—within one’s control or not—that determine black men’s lives and their chances of incarceration. She wrote, “Blacks—being poor, being despised—are automatically excluded from the game. In fact, they are expected to willingly supply the energy to present their manipulators with luxury.”1 She went on to say that black men, and by extension the black community, take this weight but are also concerned with keeping it off others.

Who Takes the Weight: Faheem Majeed derives its name from Lewis’s 1972 book Who Took the Weight? Black Voices from Norfolk Prison, an Anthology of Stories, Essays, Poems and Plays. Known to often say, “Our role is to support anything positive in black life and to destroy anything negative that touches it,” Lewis made it her life’s work to take the weight and build sites, contexts, and institutions to hold it. This included founding the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts, in operation from 1950 to 1985, Playhouse in the Park, produced from 1966 to 1977 and revived as a program of Franklin Park Conservancy today, and the National Center of Afro-American Artists, founded in 1968 and still in operation today. We cannot understand the cultural life and the institutions of the city of Boston without taking time to meditate on Lewis’s legacy.

Left: Installation detail of Board-up, 2018.Tuned Mass, Chicago Cultural Center.Recycled white wood and assorted Kool-Aid stain. 14’x5”x25’Courtesy of the Artist.

Below: Elma Ina Lewis candid, 1981. Photo: Carol Spector Courtesy of National Center of Afro-American Artists records. Archives and Special Collections Department, Northeastern University Libraries.

Grossman Gallery + Anderson Auditorium/SMFA

A counterpart and contemporary to Lewis’s role in Boston is that of Dr. Margaret Burroughs in Chicago. A visual artist, writer, poet, educator, and arts organizer, Burroughs cofounded the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), which opened in Bronzeville in 1940 with support from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, founded the DuSable Museum of African American History in 1961, and taught creative writing and creative arts at Statesville Prison for over thirty years. For Faheem Majeed, Burroughs has served as model and muse, occupying his artistic practice for some time. Synthesizing aspects of making, curating, community organizing, performance, and appropriation, Majeed is an institution builder, maker and unmaker, whose work assesses and critiques the idea of cultural value. Hailing from the South Side of Chicago, Majeed often looks to the material makeup of his neighborhood and surrounding areas as an entry point into larger questions around civic-mindedness, community activism, and institutional critique. As part of his studio practice, the artist transforms materials such as particle board, scrap metal, wood, discarded signs, and billboard remnants, breathing new life into these often overlooked and devalued materials.

Above: Massachusetts Correctional Institute Norfolk Prison Theater: Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts Solo dance from “Blackrhythms” photograph, 1972. Courtesy of National Center of Afro-American Artists records. Archives and Special Collections Department, Northeastern University Libraries.

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As an extension of this practice—as a fundamental life practice—Majeed is a deep and curious listener. He listens to space, materials, people, and neighborhoods. From 2005 to 2011, Majeed served as the executive director of the SSCAC, the only one of more than one hundred community art centers established by the WPA that remains open. Like Elma Lewis, Margaret Burroughs was a matriarch of her community, committing her life to education, supporting others, and essentially giving it all away, known to hand out Xeroxed copies of her famed prints. Near the end of her life, she said, “When I die, I want my last check to bounce.” Burroughs’s and Lewis’s work intersected, and they presumably met via the founding of the African American Museums Association (AAMA) in 1978, which started as a series of conferences initiated by Burroughs and Charles H. Wright of the Museum of African American History in Detroit. AAMA’s first office was at the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston and was chaired at the time by E. Barry Gaither, who still serves as the museum’s director.

Above: Margaret Taylor Goss (Burroughs). Circa 1940.Essay: Citadel of Culture, Publication UnknownCourtesy of the Artist.

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It is hard to begin writing about Majeed’s practice without calling all this history up to the surface, and that is precisely the point. To begin to know these people, these legacies, is to be initiated into a deep listening process, to better understand the space and sites we inhabit, the materials we use, and how that “use” and “inhabitation” is differentiated by our positionality—racially, economically, sociopolitically, and geographically. This work could not be more resonant for Boston, a liberal city known for its enduring racism problem, with the paradoxical distinction of having the most universities per capita coupled with one of the highest wealth disparities by race in the country. Just one recent statistic that reflects systemic racism in financial terms is that the household median net worth in Boston for white families is $247,500; the net worth for non-immigrant African American households is $8.2 For Majeed’s work, to delve into this history is a social practice and also an intensely material experience, one that brings together the studio and the presumptions of community.

The invitation to Majeed to produce new work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts came at the time of a planned renovation: the removal of the carpeting and reflooring of Anderson Auditorium. This carpeting was likely installed in 1987, when the building was renovated and expanded by architect Graham Gund. We decided to take something as mundane as a building renovation as an invitation to make a gesture of hospitality—to foster a way of thinking differently about how we, as a school, make culture in this building. The two resulting and interrelated installations draw upon two of Majeed’s recent bodies of work: Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden, installations that reference the SSCAC through a combination of architectural platforms and object displays and Boarded and Backboned, made from reassembled particle boards that are hand-dyed with assorted Kool-Aid flavors and that iterate as painting, sculpture, and signage.

In Anderson Auditorium, Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Indebted Mass bisects the space with a pedestal built of wood brought from Chicago—raw material in constant use and reuse in Majeed’s practice. On the pedestal rest undulating waves of the disassembled rug that used to line the floor, reminiscent of a landscape or mountain range. Its wooden structure references the wood paneling that lines the gallery at the SSCAC, designed in the New Bauhaus style, which has been in continuous use since the founding of the organization and thus is marked by an accumulation of holes, staples, and nails, all of which reflect the center’s exhibition making and unmaking.3 Majeed’s use of repurposed wood creates and

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recreates a perennial infrastructure for new object displays and platforms for activities. A perennial garden, which in general has fewer flowers than a planting of annuals because it focuses its energy on developing strong roots rather than blossoms and seeds, becomes an apt metaphor for a culturally specific space in long-term use. Majestically arranged on this historically resonant pedestal, the beat-up auditorium rug, which housed countless school meetings, receptions, and gatherings and holds the stains of thirty-two years of use, has a new life as an object of cultural value. Within its folds, it contains the life (a life) of the school. Bridging multiple spatial-temporal contexts, Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Indebted Mass asks its question quietly and resolutely: Who takes the weight of this space? This question begins specifically and reverberates outward. What are the complexities of institution-building today, in this city in particular?

These concerns echo and become flipped in Grossman Gallery, where Majeed’s Boarded and Backboned takes the form of a series of pillars covered in chipboard, brightly hand dyed in Kool-Aid colors, seemingly part of the architecture of the gallery. The chipboard references the signposts of disinvested neighborhoods, where boarding up points both to the abandonment of property and an attempt to protect an investment, thus signifying the value

Above: Margaret Burroughs Gallery.South Side Community Art CenterCourtesy of the Artist.

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of such property and its status as transitional. As Majeed has noted, whether you see the chipboard as protecting something of value or as pointing to its loss depends on where you come from. The Kool-Aid color palette references the visual vernacular of AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), an African American artists’ collective formed in Chicago in 1968. As member Barbara Jones-Hogu wrote in the AfriCOBRA manifesto, these Kool-Aid or “cool-ade” colors were central to the group’s radical black aesthetic of empowerment and self-determination: “Black, positive, direct statements created in bright, vivid, singing cool-ade colors of orange, strawberry, cherry, lemon, lime and grape. Pure vivid colors of the sun and nature. Colors that shine on Black people, colors which stand out against the greenery of rural areas.”4 These colors infuse the boarded-up pillars with new vitality and become a kind of spatial color theory. In this context, Boarded and Backboned is a model for an ambivalent and ambiguous institution of today—“pillars of the community” that infuse the institution with a political stance.

Above: Board-up, 2018.Tuned Mass, Chicago Cultural Center. Recycled white wood and assorted Kool-Aid stain.14’x5”x25’ Photo: James Prinz Photography Courtesy of the Chicago Cultural Center.

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The profound listening required to hear how the histories of black cultural production inform the present—a constant in Majeed’s practice—is critically important in Boston, where we know that black communities are culturally and economically marginalized. Majeed, as an artist hyper-invested in the city of Chicago, has created here a gesture of solidarity that reconnects Elma Lewis and Margaret Burroughs and their shared project of self-determination and elevation of black cultural life. This focus on the social life of the gallery, its materials, people, and political manifestations, along with Majeed’s spotlight on the leadership of black women in particular, speaks directly to our fractured present and the limits to equity that persist in our cultural institutions. As Lewis reminds her readers, “Listen! Or you won’t have to ask who took the weight. You and yours will be among them!”5

Abigail Satinsky is Curator of Exhibitions and Public Programs at Tufts University Art Galleries.

About the Artist

Faheem Majeed (American, b. 1976) lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He received a BFA from Howard University (Washington, DC) in 2000 and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2009. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the Cleve Carney Gallery at College of DuPage (Glen Ellyn, Illinois), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Harold Washington College President’s Gallery (Chicago), and Blanc Gallery (Chicago). Recent group exhibitions include the Chicago Cultural Center, the New Gallery of Modern Art (Charlotte, North Carolina), the Soccer Club Club (Chicago), Palais de Tokyo (Chicago), the DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago), the Bishop Gallery (Brooklyn, New York), and the Wormfarm Institute (Reedsburg, Wisconsin). Majeed is a Harpo Foundation Awardee (2016) and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2015). From 2005 to 2011, Majeed served as executive director and curator for the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), Chicago, where he curated exhibitions of work by numerous artists including Elizabeth Catlett, David Driskell, Charles White, Jonathan Green, and Theaster Gates.

Endnotes

1 Elma Lewis, Who Took the Weight? Black Voices from Norfolk Prison, an Anthology of Stories, Essays, Poems and Plays (Boston: Little, Brown & Company: 1972), xii.

2 Akilah Johnson, “That Was No Typo: The Median Net Worth of Black Bostonians Really is $8,” Boston Globe, December 11, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/11/that-was-typo-the-median-net-worth-black-bostonians-really/ze5kxC1jJelx24M3pugFFN/story.html.

3 The SSCAC was designed by Hin Bredendieck and Nathan Lerner in the New Bauhaus style and cofounded with Margaret Burroughs by László Moholy-Nagy, who came to Chicago in 1937, heading the Institute of Design (now part of the Illinois Institute of Technology) housed nearby. Following Bauhaus design principles of simplicity and functionality, the rooms included wide, vertical wood planks that ran continuously around the walls, even covering doors and some window openings with hinged panels that could be opened or closed. When closed, each room reflected an uninterrupted visual appearance. See http://www.sscartcenter.org/, accessed June 14, 2019.

4 Barbara Jones-Hogu, “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRICOBRA,” originally published in Afri-Cobra HI (Amherst: University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1973); revised by the author in 2008, published online, AREA Chicago, January 8, 2012, http://www.areachicago.org/the-history-philosophy-and-aesthetics-of-africobra/.

5 Lewis, Who Took the Weight?, xv.

Right: Carpet detail (Anderson Auditorium), 2019.Courtesy of the Artist.

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Grossman Gallery + Anderson Auditorium/SMFA22 August–26 October, 2019Grossman Gallery + Anderson Auditorium/SMFA

12 September, Thursday, 6pm-8pmOpening Reception + Roundtable Conversation

Artist Faheem Majeed; Dr. Kymberly Pinder, Provost / Vice President of Academic Affairs at MassArt; Edmund Barry Gaither, Director and Curator of the Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists; and Destiny Polk, founder of Radical Black Girl, will be in conversation on Majeed’s solo exhibition and will discuss the legacy of African American art and institution building in Boston and Chicago.

Exhibition Curator: Abigail Satinsky, Curator, Exhibitions and Public Programs, Tufts Univerity Art Galleries

Design: Chad KouriPrinting: Fox Publishing

SMFA

at Tufts / 230 Fenway / Boston, M

A 02115

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an Arts Center / 40 Talbot Ave. / M

edford, MA

02155TU

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august 22 – october 26, 2019 - tufts university

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