Frist Art Museum to Present Fahamu Pecou Exhibition

The Frist Art Museum in Nashville will present This Face Behind This Mask Behind This Skin, a major exhibition of recent work by Dr. Fahamu Pecou, on view from October 10, 2025, through January 4, 2026. Organized by the museum, the exhibition examines contemporary representations of Black identity through painting, sculpture, and video.

Pecou, an Atlanta-based interdisciplinary artist and scholar, blends hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture in his practice. His work interrogates the performance of Black masculinity and identity, offering new frameworks for how Blackness is seen and expressed. The exhibition surveys three key 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.

Fahamu Pecou. End of Safety: Introspection, 2025. Acrylic on canvas; 96 x 120. Image courtesy of the artist. © Fahamu Pecou

Exploring Black Identity

In End of Safety, Pecou explores the fragile space between imposed identity and personal liberation. Works like Illusion portray figures cloaked in veils, asking viewers to consider what it means to move beyond prescribed narratives. We Didn’t Realize We Were Seeds draws on Afrotropes, recurring forms in African diasporic visual culture, reimagining them for the present. In Real Negus Don’t Die, begun in 2013, Pecou pays tribute to icons such as Toni Morrison, Afeni Shakur, and Tupac Shakur, using T-shirts as mobile memorials that affirm Black lineage across generations.

Film and Concurrent Exhibitions

The exhibition also introduces The Store, a film where corner shops transform into portals for surreal visions of sovereignty, memory, and future possibilities. Presented alongside the concurrent exhibition New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, Pecou’s show positions his paintings and performances as contemporary masquerades rooted in African cosmology.

About the Artist

Dr. Fahamu Pecou, Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, holds a PhD from Emory University and is the founder of the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA). His work has been collected by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and others. His art has appeared in television shows such as Black-ish and The Chi, and he has been recognized with awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

Opening Program

The exhibition opens with a public conversation between Pecou and Michael J. Ewing, Associate Curator at the Frist, on October 11 at 2:00 p.m. in the museum auditorium.