Dr. Fahamu Pecou

is an interdisciplinary artist and public scholar whose work interrogates and redefines representations of Black masculinity within contemporary culture. Working across painting, performance, and critical writing, his practice engages hip-hop, popular culture, and art history to examine the ways Black identity is constructed, performed, and contested in public space.

Pecou’s work operates at the intersection of image and idea, positioning the Black male body as both subject and site of inquiry. Through layered visual languages and conceptual frameworks, he challenges dominant narratives while proposing new modes of self-definition rooted in autonomy, resistance, and possibility.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in major public and private collections both nationally and internationally, including: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the High Museum of Art, MUMOK (Vienna), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Seattle Art Museum. His work has also appeared in film and television, including HBO’s Between the World and Me, Black-ish, and The Chi.

A recipient of numerous honors, Pecou was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France. He has also received the Joan Mitchell Foundation “Painters and Sculptors” Award and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.

Pecou holds a Ph.D. from Emory University, where his dissertation, Do or Die: Affect, Ritual, Resistance, took the form of a multi-disciplinary exhibition. He is the founder and Executive Director of the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA), a contemporary art museum dedicated to amplifying the art and culture of the African diaspora.