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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. It is February and an honor of Black History Month. This year we're going to highlight the intersection of Black Art and History. We're calling the series Black Art History. Later this week we'll talk about the founding of the Studio Museum in Harlem with its director and chief curator, Thelma Golden. Photographer Ming Smith will join us to discuss her show at the Museum of Modern Art.

We'll hear about the Mets show about Black potters, and today we kick off the series with an artist whose installation on the High Line conjures the power of the Black press. The piece is titled Freedom Stand, and it's named after the first black-owned and operated newspaper in New York City Freedom's Journal founded in 1827.

The Peace Freedom Stand is on the High Line at 30th Street until August 2023. Joining me now to talk about it and his practice as an artist and educator is Faheem Majeed, the Chicago-based artist work has been shown around the world. He recently received the field in a MacArthur Foundation's leaders for a New Chicago Award.

He was the executive director of Chicago Southside Community Arts Center, which Majeed co-founded, and is the co-director of the Floating Museum, an arts collective that brings art to neighborhoods. By the way, the Floating Museum team was chosen to direct the 2023 Chicago Architectural Biannual. They are busy. He is busy. We are so glad you made time today, Faheem. Nice to meet you.

Faheem Majeed: Nice to meet you too. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Freedom Stand was commissioned for the High Line. What were the initial conversations like?

Faheem Majeed: Well, initially I was nominated to submit a proposal for the Plinth project which like 50 artists or so came up with ways of envisioning that space. Unfortunately, mine wasn't selected, but I think the curators really liked the concept of what I was thinking about and some of the ways I was thinking about a structure that contrasted the space. They approached me separately, and I was really happy it worked out and I actually really, really love the location. It's the perfect location for it.

Alison Stewart: Yes, because the insulation is big. I just walked upon it on MLK Day. I was walking the High Line thinking about life and there it was and I thought, "Wow, what is this?" 15-foot structure, then I did a little digging. The structure itself is based on an African cart, is that right?

Faheem Majeed: Yes. It's a mix. It's based on the outmoded newspaper stand. That's why it's called Freedom Stand. It's a little bit of a play on words, a Freedom's Journal, and a newspaper Stand, which is used to be spaces of congregation. It was like Facebook before there was Facebook, or the Instagram before there's Instagram and a little bit of a billboard. A little bit of a way of getting information or what was going on very local.

That's outmoded. A lot of these structures still sit around Chicago. They grandfathered in and actually become gathering spaces for senior citizens to sell, just have coffee and hang out. I want to honor that history, but also honor the role of the Black voice and the Black newspaper, the notion of our voice. The messages aren't necessarily about Black news, but it's about world news through a black lens and a black voice without editing. I just wanted to honor that.

Alison Stewart: What materials did you use?

Faheem Majeed: It's also inspired by Dogan architecture, like these pill houses. A lot of the wood is reclaimed wood from old demo buildings. I really wanted to honor the intuitive building that you see in a lot of the newspaper Stands where things don't quite line up. They're more on function and start to emulate shanties and shacks in a way to be around functionality to really highlight the message that was going out.

Alison Stewart: All along the structure are the front pages of Black papers. Where did you go to research the papers?

Faheem Majeed: Initially, I had this really great young researcher named ‪Shaila Jamal who's in school at Northwestern right now, getting her master's. She was really an amazing person to work with. In that, everywhere-- we really just scratched the surface. I could make like a hundred of these newspaper stands all with different messages. What was great was a lot of the information was readily available because oftentimes, our voices aren't really honored. Somewhere someone has taken the time to make some of these things available.

We have our deep archives and then we have our surface archives of really cooling the best of as many diverse best of as possible but the Black voices not myopic. It's very diverse. There's some conservative perspectives in here, along with some very liberal perspectives going all the way back to the first newspaper, black-owned, black-managed newspaper Freedoms Journal back in 1827. It's really almost like sci-fi.

It's like the newspaper of the past and the present, and sometimes they're talking about pushes against vaccinations and pushes against anti-vaccine and things like that. They're talking about 1920. They're not talking about the current. It's also amazing that the news is the same. That's what's really amazing. It's cyclical. The same headlines then are the same headlines now, Black boys being killed.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Faheem Majeed, the name of the piece is Freedom Stand. You can see it at the High Line at 30th Street until August 2023. I was looking through all the different images. There was one from 1919, a paper the Chicago Whip, with a huge headline, send Race to Africa. There was the Floris Sanal Bulletin from 1971. It says Blacks start mixing at all white Church. What were you looking for when you were looking at the imagery?

Faheem Majeed: The design. All of these front pages are designed really well. Also, it's about sucking you in. You start to learn, each paper has a different way of doing that. Some of my favorites are the Black Panther newspapers which are very image strong. Those are some of my favorites. Actually some of the older newspapers, the big splashes are on the backend because the smaller fun are on the front because that's where the advertisements are.

We found advertisements and all types of things, but from The American in Washington DC which was very political. Things about Booker T. Washington W.E.B Dubois, Malcolm X versus Martin. You get lost actually. It was actually very hard to select.

Alison Stewart: I'm sure.

Faheem Majeed: We rotate them every month what we paste in. I was also thinking about this notion of going up, shaving down, and then coming back and pasting over and over and over. Each month there's a selection that gets put up. Actually, it's hard to choose because it's fascinating.

Alison Stewart: Well, and that's also what's great about it is if you've already seen this, you should go back and look again because it's going to be different. It's got a life to it because you are going to rotate the papers.

Faheem Majeed: That's right.

Alison Stewart: What was something that you learned about the Black press that maybe you didn't really understand or fully understand before you got into this project?

Faheem Majeed: One of the things The Chicago Defender is really important to the great migration. The Chicago Defender and the Pullman porters would take newspapers down south and sometimes you wouldn't get the newspaper for months out. It would be a really old newspaper but it was really sending messages. The Pullman would sneak them down south and disseminate them amongst Black communities about jobs in the north, opportunities in the north but also there are these columns about how to behave.

When you come up north, you got to put some shoes on, you got to do this. You got to [inaudible 00:08:49]. How important the Black newspaper nations pass and people would get killed. People would get lynched. People would get arrested for having these newspapers. That's one of the things that I found to be incredibly informative.

It is not just about the paper itself, but it's about the importance of unedited black voice that oftentimes the things that we own as Black are not actually ours. They're not owned. They're edited and controlled.

The other pleasure that I had was actually working with my uncle who has a Black newspaper called Nubian News in Trenton, New Jersey. It's growing up with him doing that and being able to put his newspaper on a newspaper stand when he drives into New York and gets his newspapers often as a black-owned newspaper. It was a real treat to be able to honor that as a part of this.

Alison Stewart: Well, that's exciting. Some of our listeners, we can reach down to near where your uncle's paper is. That's in our listening area. Love that. My guest is Faheem Majeed, we are talking about Freedom Stand at 30th Street on the High Line. Also want to talk about his practice a bit. It's clear that you're deeply invested in bringing art to communities and public art. This is the broad question and the narrow question. Broadly, why is public art important? Then, specifically, why is public art important to you?

Faheem Majeed: A lot of my work is in public space. My mother was a social worker, my father was a politician, so I do all those things in my work as well. Public art is something versus what's private. The argument is like, "All art is public." Well, yes and no. Anyone can enjoy public art. Meaning, you can go to a gallery, but you have to opt into that. You know when you go into a museum that you're signing up to see something. Public art it's in public space, so people don't have an option. You're engaged with it. You're walking down the street, and you're confronted with this thing. Oftentimes, the scrutiny of public art is much stronger because oftentimes, it's not asked for.

I really thought that this can be challenging. There's some views on here that people push against. A lot of people have issues with Farrakhan. A lot of people have issues with Kanye West. I think he's on there at one point. There's a lot of things. There is some risk, and I really want to say how much I appreciate the High Line, the curators, Melanie, Jordan, who was installing there, and the whole team for taking on this project, which could ruffle some feathers as well. Public art is a really important aspect of my work as well [unintelligible 00:11:46]

Alison Stewart: Your artist statement on your website, you wrote, "On the whole, my artwork functions like breadcrumbs in the forest, leading my audience back to the people and spaces I value or that I believe should be valued by others." How did you know that you wanted to use your art in this way?

Faheem Majeed: I like to think my work has something for everyone to eat. I think about points of entry. An archivist can really love this piece. They can go in deep and actually, end up knowing more about the subject matter than myself. A curator can come in and think about this and how it parses out and installation changes into exhibition. A gallery can think about that. Also, one of my favorite things is when I went there, I popped up, and there was a woman with her daughter there, seven-year-old, and just watching them navigated through beauty and curiosity.

You don't need to know every aspect of it. Actually, it's nice when you come in through the beauty and then realize there's more there. When you return, you're like, "Oh, I didn't realize. I thought about it. Now, there's other layers to it." Beauty is fine. I love beauty, but I also like creating complex structures and beautiful things as well. It's challenging sometimes, but for me, none of those things are good without the other.

Alison Stewart: Tell us about the Floating Museum.

Faheem Majeed: [chuckles] How much time you got? No.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] That's two minutes, three minutes.

Faheem Majeed: Three minutes, okay. The Floating Museum, it's collaborative. It was a passion project that originally, the idea came out of a project of thinking about floating a model of DuSable Museum, which was the world's first African-American museum founded in Chicago. The structure, it is now as a model and floating down the Chicago river from the south side to the downtown corridor. As a gesture, think about what happens to a Black institution when it actually has access to the types of capital and cultural capital that's offered downtown.

It was a gesture, but through that we began to build a huge collective and started thinking about the city as the museum, which is Floating Museum. The City of Chicago in this stance is the museum, its neighborhoods are the galleries, and its citizens are the cultural producers, and pushing against the myth that communities don't have culture. We don't bring art to communities. We find the art in the communities and bolster it and supply it with resources to make it stronger. We collaborate, we work with and not for.

We do that in a lot of different ways. Right now we've been charged with being the curators for the Chicago Architecture Biennial. We're actually coming to town this weekend and do a research trip, do a lot of studio visits. We have a lot of New York architects and artists that are rejoining us in Chicago. We have over 100 or so architects and designers that are going to be activating the city along with community collaborators that we built over our 7-year tenure. We're excited. September 2023, we're going to blow up the city [unintelligible 00:14:54]

Alison Stewart: In our last moments, if someone goes to see Freedom’s Stand at the High Line, which I'm sure many people will now, what are some questions you'd like them to consider?

Faheem Majeed: I love the 200-year arc. I like to think about how one thing communicates with another thing. It's almost like a yearbook of time, thinking about what has happened since, how far have we come, how far haven't we come. Then, also, do some digging on your own. Just Google some of these. It's like there's so many Black-owned newspapers that don't exist anymore. Their archives are amazing. Each front headline page, someone took a lot of time to put together, so it's also a lot of labor as well.

Alison Stewart: There's also people that you can look up.

Faheem Majeed: There's people, yes, a lot.

Alison Stewart: There's faces. That's a Google rabbit hole. [laughs]

Faheem Majeed: Yes.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Faheem Majeed. The name of the piece is Freedom's Stand. It is at 30th Street on the High Line. It is up until August 2023. As you heard, it changes and rotates and evolves every month, so you can definitely keep checking it out all year long. Faheem, thank you so much for making time for us and being with us.

Faheem Majeed: Yes, thank you.

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