Fahamu Pecou “Black Matter Lives”

Lyons Wier Gallery

This event has ended.

The first time I viewed Fahamu’s work, I felt his painting prowess was only surpassed by his astute storytelling. Fahamu has long used self-portraiture to shed light on what he felt were social misconceptions and injustices of African American men and how they were/are portrayed in popular culture, hip-hop culture and mainstream media. Drawing upon his alter-ego, “Fahamu Pecou is The Shit,” Fahamu developed a visual trope to address these societal ills using mastheads, swagger and ingenious double entendres.

#BLACKMATTERLIVES is the culmination of Fahamu’s four consecutive museum shows, including “Do or Die,” (an exhibition representing aspects of his research as a PhD student) currently on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC. These shows provided Fahamu with the opportunity to further mine his trope and emerge with a new vocabulary. A vocabulary that synthesizes not only what is happening around him, but also what is going on inside of him. With #BLACKMATTERLIVES, he shifts from being a general narrator to a very personal raconteur, stripping away many of the secondary visual triggers that were used in his earlier works to ease the viewer into his own perceptions and personae. In #BLACKMATTERLIVES, Fahamu delivers a watershed series, wrought with unabashed angst, anger and adulations.

There is an undeniable racial disconnect happening not only in the United States but around the world. Fahamu has his finger on the pulse of this divide and is using it to tell a very personal tale. The raw emotions portrayed in this exhibition are palpable. The twisting and writhing of the body immediately draws reference to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign, but it does not take much imagination to transfer these emotions from the subject (the artist) to the multitude of people suffering around the world.

Pecou states, “Black Americans grow up with near schizophrenic emotions about our value and place in society. On one hand, we are celebrated and commodified—on the other, vilified and feared. We wrestle daily with a stigmatization that promotes a sense of worthlessness and angst and that often animates Black comportment.

#BLACKMATTERLIVES attempts to reorient this angst and despair. There exists inherent brilliance, beauty and transformative power within the Black body. Interminable, innovatory, resourceful, resilient… Blackness persists! It persists not despite the trauma with which it is often associated, but rather, because of it. It persists because each attempt to deny its power is an invitation for its expansion. Each attempt to break the spirit of Blackness only opens it up more, freeing Black matter to pursue higher and more elaborate states of being.
Black Matter Lives. Now. Always.”