This new exhibition at the Frist Museum in Nashville presents the work of Atlanta-based artist and scholar Dr. Fahamu Pecou. The exhibition’s title reads like a mantra—an embodiment of being and becoming. Dr. Pecou’s work explores contemporary representations of Black masculinity and identity through painting, mixed-media sculpture, and critical theory. This exhibition brings together his recent series End of Safety, Real Negus Don’t Die, and We Didn’t Realize We Were Seeds, and debuts a multichannel video installation featuring his short Afro-Surrealist film The Store.
End of Safety examines how cultural hegemony has shaped Black American identity, suggesting it is often imposed rather than self-defined. Pecou explores the tension between the imposition of Blackness and the comfort that arises from it. He confronts the idea of stepping beyond that comfort—imagining the delicate, dangerous, and necessary act of seeing ourselves free from the stories the world imposes.
We Didn’t Realize We Were Seeds explores Black identity across time and cultures, encompassing art, fashion, politics, and spirituality. Pecou employs Afrotropes—recurring visual forms that have emerged within, and become central to, the formation of African diasporic visual culture. He exercises his agency as an artist not only by referencing Afrotropes but by actively creating and reconfiguring them, giving these visual forms new life in contemporary culture. Durags become masks or crowns that adorn Black bodies. Backpacks rest on books as mobile altars of remembrance. Resin molds of Baule figures become surrogate sculptures of spiritual retention and contemporary sites for divine communication. These works open portals into Afro-Surrealist terrain and enact the “right to opacity”: the right to remain irreducibly complex and not fully transparent, yet open to resonance.
The Store is a short film composed of four vignettes, each centered at a corner store that doubles as a hood botanica, where patrons unlock portals into surreal, liberating visions. The Store reclaims symbols of survival and reframes them as gateways to Black sovereignty, memory, and futures.
Together, these series conjure what Pecou calls re-memberance: “the reconnection of mind, body, and spirit—a holistic treatise on Black being, becoming, and possibility.”
Join us on Oct 11, at 2 pm for an opening conversation featuring Dr. Pecou in conversation with Frist Museum curator, Michael Ewing.
For more information please visit: https://fristartmuseum.org/exhibition/fahamu-pecou/
On October 16, join us for a riveting conversation with Dr. Fahamu Pecou and Cebo Campbell, author of the acclaimed novel “Sky Full of Elephants”, moderated by Michael Ewing.
