Dr. Fahamu Pecou, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose works combine observations on hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture to address concerns around contemporary representations of Black men. Through paintings, performance art, and academic work, Dr. Pecou confronts the social construct of Black masculinity and Black identity, challenging and expanding the reading, performance, and expressions of Blackness.

Dr. Fahamu Pecou received his BFA at the Atlanta College of Art in 1997 and a M. A. and Ph.D. from Emory University in 2017 and 2018 respectively. Dr. Pecou exhibits his art worldwide in addition to lectures and speaking engagements at colleges and universities.

As an educator, Dr. Pecou has developed (ad)Vantage Point, a narrative-based arts curriculum focused on Black male youth. Dr. Pecou is also Founder and Executive Director of the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA).

Pecou’s work is featured in noted private and public national and international collections including; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and Culture, Societe Generale (Paris), Nasher Museum at Duke University, The High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Seattle Art Museum, Paul R. Jones Collection, ROC Nation, Clark Atlanta University Art Collection and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia.

Dr. Pecou is a recipient of the 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.  In 2020, Pecou was one of 6 artists selected for Emory University’s groundbreaking Arts & Social Justice Fellowship. Additionally, Pecou was the Georgia awardee for the 2020 South Arts Prize. In 2017 he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition “Miroirs de l’Homme” in Paris, France. A recipient of the 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation “Painters and Sculptors” Award, his work also appears in several films and television shows including; HBO’s Between the World and Me, Black-ish, and The Chi. Pecou’s work has also been featured on numerous publications including Atlanta Magazine, Hanif Abdurraqib’s poetry collection, “A Fortune for Your Disaster” and the award-winning collection of short stories by Rion Amilcar Scott, “The World Doesn’t Require You.”

Through his practice, Dr. Fahamu Pècou questions and challenges the legacy of images and representations of Black identity, especially Black male masculinity. By engaging with various stereotypes and misconceptions about Black men–both those imposed and those assumed–he attempts a critical intervention concerning the visible and invisible threads that make up our collective understandings of Black identity.

Incorporating various expressions of “Blackness,” which includes the visual iconography of Yoruba (Ifa) spirituality, the somatic attitude of hip-hop bravado, and philosophy of the négritude movement, Pècou works to re-member the fractured Black body. In mining the Black experience both historically and contemporaneously, he can dynamically engage this theme with work that though rooted in the Black experience, provides meaningful engagement across all walks of life.

His works take the form of paintings, videos, original music and performance-based projects with each medium allowing him to articulate various nuances around the theme.