This interdisciplinary visual artist has set the bar for black male representation in contemporary art. Dr Fahamu Pecou illustrates the young black male figure in his stereotypical attire and appearance in America perfectly. While challenging his ethnical and tribal actualities. These painting reference his deep rooted African heritage and royalties through images of dance, fatherhood, spirituality and tradition.
I can appreciate Dr. Fahamu’s creative dialogue between black men and women, maternal figures shown practicing rituals while crowning, blessing, and praying over him. It inserts the black woman into the black mans life as a yet humbling and balanced necessity to survive in the American culture he is masked for. Dr. Fahamu explains this collections as a story of a masked black male spirit being guided and restored back into the physical world.
His choice of materials in the sculptures of this collection look so live. While re-imaging a 3D male figured mannequin similar to the one in his paintings, crouched in a tribal dance position. He is dressed in white pants and nike sneakers under fabrications covered in the names of black male victims killed by American police officers.
I believe that Dr. Pecou’s personal separation from black masculine stereotypes, as an educated artist and scholar, gives him a clear scope to channel into his work his resilience from what is to be expected of his very gender and racial being.