Impression

Andrew Fafacz Gallery, 2018

Impression marked Faheem Majeed’s first commercial gallery exhibition in Chicago, bringing together two intertwined bodies of work that explore memory, place, and cultural endurance. Within ANDREW RAFACZ Gallery, Majeed transformed humble materials—particle board, scrap metal, and powdered Kool-Aid—into luminous abstractions recalling both the boarded-up architecture of disinvested neighborhoods and the radiant palette of AfriCOBRA’s “Cool-Ade” aesthetic. These reassembled panels, hovering between painting, sculpture, and signage, speak to cycles of loss and renewal that define many communities.

Anchoring the exhibition was Demise Shroud, a seventy-foot charcoal rubbing of the South Side Community Art Center’s gallery floor. This muslin work captured decades of artistic passage through the center’s halls, its surface holding traces of thousands of artists who shaped Chicago’s Black cultural history. The act of rubbing—pressing charcoal into fabric to record architectural memory—becomes a gesture of both preservation and mourning.

For Majeed, Impression evokes multiple meanings: a mark, an echo, a memory. The works connect a rooted past to a precarious present, suggesting that from erasure and neglect can emerge new forms of visibility. Through material transformation and reverent observation, Majeed invites viewers to consider how histories of care, labor, and imagination might build a more resilient future.