NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Frist Art Museum presents This Face Behind This Mask Behind This Skin, a survey exhibition of recent work by Dr. Fahamu Pecou, an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work bridges hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture to examine contemporary representations in Black culture. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist’s Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery from October 10, 2025 through January 4, 2026.
Through paintings, performance art, and academic work, Pecou confronts the social construct of Black masculinity and Black identity, challenging and expanding the reading, performance, and expressions of Blackness. This exhibition surveys his recent bodies of work 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 addresses the tension between the imposition of Black American identity and the comfort it can bring. Works in this series such as Illusion, in which a figure is shrouded in a veil that obscures identity, ask what it means to step beyond comfort and imagine, as Pecou describes, “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, and the use of Afrotropes—recurring visual forms that have emerged within and become central to African diasporic visual culture. “Pecou 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,” writes Frist Art Museum Associate Curator Michael J. Ewing, “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.”
A series of richly textured acrylic paintings titled Real Negus Don’t Die, begun in 2013, is an evolving tribute to iconic African American figures—including Toni Morrison, Afeni Shakur, and Tupac Shakur—whose lives and legacies continue to shape the rhythm and resonance of Black cultural identity. Negus, pronounced NAY-goos, is a word from the Amharic language spoken in Ethiopia meaning “king” and is offered here as a nonbinary term underscoring royalty. “Often mistaken for a slur, negus is deliberately deployed to disrupt, to dignify, and to declare, becoming fertile ground for liberatory reclamation,” writes Ewing. Rooted in ancestral veneration, each painting features a living subject wearing a T-shirt as a memorial. “These shirts, worn as mobile shrines to the iconic figures, become public affirmations of grief, love, and unbroken lineage,” Ewing explains. “They collapse time through the living subject, asserting that Black life cannot be flattened by death.”
The Store is a short film composed of four vignettes, each centered at a corner store 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.
Concurrently on view in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery is New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, which highlights the stories of four contemporary West African masquerade artists. “Together, Fahamu Pecou’s exhibition and New African Masquerades present each artist’s distinct contemporary approaches, with shared throughlines coalescing into a broader Pan-African expression—one that honors ancestral knowledge while shaping new contributions to cultural discourse,” writes Ewing. “Seeing the shows together invites viewers to first consider Pecou as a performance artist—his photographed performances are later transcribed into paintings—offering insight into them not as self-portraits or autobiographical works, but as masquerades or embodiments of larger expressions rooted in African cosmology.”
About the Artist
Dr. Fahamu Pecou, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, received his BFA at the Atlanta College of Art in 1997 and a MA and PhD 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 six 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.”
Program
Opening Conversation
Presented by Fahamu Pecou and Michael J. Ewing
Saturday, October 11, 2:00 p.m.
Auditorium
Free for members; gallery admission required for not-yet-members
Join Fahamu Pecou for this conversation with Associate Curator Michael J. Ewing to learn more about the exhibition This Face Behind This Mask Behind This Skin.
Exhibition Credit
Organized by the Frist Art Museum
Supporter Acknowledgment
Supported in part by Clay Blevins and the Gordon CAP Gallery Fund
The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by The Frist Foundation, Metro Arts, and the Tennessee Arts Commission, which receives funding in part from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Connect with us @FristArtMuseum #TheFrist
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