Mass Appeal Magazine
#44 Spring 2007

Original Flavor: Fahamu Pecou
Words: Annmarie Donnegan

Living in cities like NY, LA or London, it’s become almost second nature to pass by art containing someone’s face, plastered in the form of a sticker, poster or stencil and pay it no mind. But then there’s Fahamu Pecou, an artist who makes you actually think about who it is you’re looking at.

Fahamu was born and raised in Brooklyn until the age of five when he moved down to South Carolina to live with relatives. Fahamu later moved to the ATL to attend school at the Atlanta College of Art, where he received his BFA in painting and digital media. He credits one of his early inspirations to an unlikely source. “J.J. Evans. That was probably like my first inspiration,” he says. “He was funny, witty, whatever, so that’s the kind of artist I always kind of envisioned myself to be.” Fahamu also found inspiration in the works of artistic big-wigs like Picasso and Franco. Yet, before he began NEOPOP, which consists of his magazine cover paintings and live performances designed to comment on the state of attitudes towards celebrity, Fahamu was on more of an expressionistic tip. “A lot of the stuff I was doing before I started doing the magazine covers were these pieces that are based on my Ifá religion,” he says, “I would call them portraits of ancestors…they were much more abstract than the stuff that I do now.”

“Anytime I would see a magazine with somebody on the cover that I never heard of—automatically I wanna look them up and see, who is this person?” It is this growing fascination with celebrity that makes Fahamu’s paintings all the more relevant. He’s done dozens of covers from artistic publications like Art Review to more urban-themed periodicals like Anthem. During each of his exhibitions, Fahamu hires photographers to pose as paparazzi during his arrival. “You know, I’ll arrive at an opening with girls on my arms and bodyguards and red carpets, so the performances are kind of observations on celebrity culture.”

Fahamu’s concentration on image and how it’s sought, built and retained, proves that he’s so much more than just a random guy trying to paint himself onto a cover. “Every now and then I get the comment about being vain,” he says. “In a lot of ways it’s not even me that I’m painting on the cover, you know what I’m saying? It’s my face, but it’s not me, it’s this kind of character that I’ve created that looks like me. But the whole idea to kind of play with the way that people react to celebrities like, Why is this such a big thing for us—why does it move us like that?” While Fahamu is busy managing his digital media company, Diamond Lounge Creative, he still sets his sights on bigger and bolder venues for his art. “I have this fantasy to do like an installation in Times Square where I redo all the billboards and ads in Times Square with myself in it. Something crazy like that.”