ARTE: Fahamu Pecou

Atlanta based artist Fahamu Pecou is famous!  Taken from the artist website here is is statement about how and what he creates.  We included paintings of a series of magazine covers but Fahamu also works as a performance artist and a digital artist.  Having just successfully funding his kickstarter campaign for a new series If Heaven Had Heights, the artist is preparing for a show in NY and Paris to present this series.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work can be viewed as meditations on contemporary popular culture. I began my career experimenting with practices employed in contemporary branding strategies, particularly as they pertained to hip-hop music. These experiments ultimately led me to question not only the stereotypes that drive consumerism, fame, celebrity-worship etc. but how an unspoken racial and cultural divide often influenced these factors.  I appear in my work not in an autobiographical sense, but as an allegory. My character becomes a stand-in to represent black masculinity and both the realities and fantasies projected from and onto black male bodies. I seek to challenge the expectations around black men and, to a larger extent, society in general. Adopting the traits typically associated with black men in hip hop, I extract them from their more popular associations and distort or exaggerate them by appropriating them within a fine art context. The end result is a parody on our obsession with celebrity, our exploitation of black masculinity and the divide that racial ignorance and stereotypes perpetuate. These ideas are expressed in paintings, videos and live performances. Each medium allows me to articulate various nuances around my themes and further distort the assumptions we tend to make about one another.