ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION : VISUAL ARTS 01.15.06
A Wannabe Star is Born
By Catherine Fox - Staff

While the real Fahamu Pecou is hard at work making other people famous at his graphic design studio, Diamond Lounge Creative, his Diddy alter ego stares insolently from the covers of artsy magazines just acrosss the street, at Ty Stokes Gallery.

Bare-chested or wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with his motto --- "Fahamu Pecou is the [expletive]" --- he may be smoking a cigar or lolling with a model.

The magazine covers are, of course, fictional --- large paintings covered in hip-hop slang graffiti. Like Pecou's performances, the paintings are satirical. They target the cult of celebrity and celebrity worshippers, hip-hop bravado, stereotyping. Pecou uses the graffiti as commentary. In one painting, he scrawls "And it's not even February" --- a wry allusion to Black History Month.

The Brooklyn-born artist --- his name is pronounced fa-HA-moo PAY-coo and is Swahili for "understanding" --- clearly loves taking the art world down a peg or two. "Art magazines are often times so prudish and highbrow," Pecou says. "I like the irony of grabbing my crotch on the cover of Art Papers [the Atlanta-based publication]. Also, it's a new day. Art magazines don't accommodate everyone, but they will have to."

Pecou's brand of identity politics has something in common with African-American peers such as Kehinde Wiley, whose painting made a cover of Art in America, and Mickalene Thomas, but he has developed his own voice. In a world in which promotion is king, Pecou, 30, has marshaled the marketing skills honed in business to do a hip-hop version of the emperor's new clothes.

When the concept began germinating five years ago, however, it was not art. The Atlanta College of Art grad, who was struggling to make a name for himself as an artist, observed the rise of the rapper 50 Cent.

"It was pure promotion," he says. "He was everywhere you turned before his record even came out. [It seemed like] you could be a star just because someone said you were."

He decided to give himself the same treatment. He invented his tagline and his image. "I got my homeboy to take a picture of me with my head thrown back, no shirt, cigar. No glasses, of course," he says. "When I saw it, I thought, 'This is hot.' " He used his slogan and picture on "marketing collateral" --- posters, stickers, fliers, T-shirts --- that directed people to his Web site, where he displayed his art, then a variety of things from cubist-style paintings to installations.

In popular culture, using the common term for excrement to describe something, he says, is "the highest compliment." Knowing that the curse word might be dicey, he tried to come up with an alternative, but none had the requisite pop.

" 'Fahamu Pecou is very good' doesn't have the same ring," he says, with a grin.

It turned out that people were more interested in Fahamu the dude than in Fahamu the artist. Surprised by the number of requests for posters and T-shirts (one from a college professor), he was emboldened to test people's credulity in other ways. He sent out a flier advertising "Official [Expletive]," an event at the Apache Cafe in 2002, which attracted a crowd even though the flier gave no information, only his picture. That provided a great Clark Kent moment when a guest came up to Pecou, who was wearing one of his T-shirts, at the bar and asked, "What do you think he's going to do? " For the record, he got on stage with an easel and began painting a self-portrait. The DJ started the music, and everybody danced.

The next year, he invented a magazine. He put an illustration of a cover featuring himself on a postcard mailer. This led to the first painting in his new vein in October 2004. He exhibited it and several others a few months later at the Five Spot in Little Five Points and attended the opening of the show in his hip-hop persona. The crowd ate it up, he says. At that point, Pecou's self-promotion crystallized into his new art form.

Pecou was not a total novice in the performing arts. He was a rapper in his youth, and he developed a comic character, Sexual Chocolate, named after the washed-up lounge singer in the 1988 Eddie Murphy movie "Coming to America." He played at spoken-word concerts in 1999. Still, assuming the role of the hip-hop celeb was not easy.

"His cockiness is so far removed from my personality," Pecou says. "I was uncomfortable even saying [my motto]. It was a running joke with friends. I had to grow into it. "

He embellished the persona with an entourage for the "Art Beats + Lyrics" party at the High Museum last spring. A stylist friend found an Yves St. Laurent cream-colored suit at a thrift store for $15 that fit him perfectly. Another friend agreed to pose as his "arm candy." And he hired a real bodyguard ---a tall, burly man named Big Daddy, who had a voice like James Earl Jones and took his role very seriously.

Pecou enjoys playing the celebrity, but doesn't seem in danger of forgetting that it is a pose.

"He wants to have that stature, but he doesn't want to get it that way," says his wife, Nitefa, a teacher at the Children's School. "He's doing it on his terms --- making art and making a point.

"He's really a sensitive guy," she adds. "It's very funny to me."

Her amusement probably helps keep him real. So does his myopia. Though he reveled in attention he received at the opening, he admitted, "I'm blind without my glasses. I couldn't see a thing."