All of the Parts
DOCUMENT, April 18, 2024–June 7, 2025
DOCUMENT is delighted to present All of the Parts, Faheem Majeed’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Opening on April 18, 2025, the exhibition comprises two distinct bodies of newly realized works by the Chicago-based artist, curator, educator, and non-profit administrator.
Growing up in a home filled with African and African-inspired artwork, Majeed was surrounded by objects that symbolized cultural pride and an effort to reclaim a fractured lineage. His parents, like many Black Americans, adorned their walls with what was broadly termed "African Art"—not Igbo, Yoruba, Senufo, or Guera, but simply African. The specific origins were unknown, and perhaps, at the time, unknowable. What mattered most was the symbolic gesture—the reclaiming of something lost, stolen, or erased. In his new series of wall sculptures, All of the Parts (2025), Faheem Majeed uses traditional wood-carving techniques to replicate elements of African masks of unknown origin. Using pine, cedar, different wood stains, and shoe polish, each piece in the series isolates and reinterprets a segment of a traditional African mask—not to reconstruct the whole, but to sit with the fragments. To investigate what it means to yearn for a connection to something unknowable. These parts are not replicas; they are echoes. They represent gestures of reaching, of trying to understand, and perhaps to possess, something that feels essential yet intangible. This series asks what it means to collect in absence of clarity, to claim lineage without lineage, to piece together identity from fragments. It speaks to the legacy of diasporic disconnection—and the creativity, necessity, and tenderness found in the effort to reconnect.
