The End of Safety
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tenn
Montresso Art Foundation, Marrakech, Morocco
2025
2023
The End of Safety explores the fragile constructs of identity and the difficult process of self-definition beyond imposed frameworks of Blackness. Drawing from the writings of James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon, the series considers what it means to relinquish inherited narratives in order to encounter the self anew. Through this lens, safety is revealed not as protection, but as constraint and ultimately, something that must be surrendered in order to access a more authentic and unencumbered existence.
Across drawings, paintings, and sculpture, Pecou uses layered visual and conceptual strategies to image the delicate act of shedding social constraints and the uncertainty that follows. In this space of rupture, identity is no longer fixed, but constantly emerging (evolving), formed through risk, introspection, and the willingness to move beyond what has been inscribed on Black bodies.
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End of Safety: Surrender
2023.
Acrylic on canvas
60×36 in -
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End of Safety: Revelation
2023.
Acrylic on canvas
40×30 in -
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End of Safety: What We Resist Persists
2023.
Acrylic on canvas
24×20 in
(Commission for the “1619 Project: A Visual Experience”) -
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End of Safety: Illusion
2023.
Acrylic on canvas.
36 × 72 in -
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End of Safety: Liberation
2025.
Acrylic on canvas
96×120in -
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End of Safety: Liberation
2025.
Acrylic on canvas
72×36 in -
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End of Safety: It'll Cost You
2021.
Acrylic on canvas
72×72” -
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End of Safety: Freedom Ain't Free
2021.
Acrylic on canvas
72 × 72 in -
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End of Safety
2023.
Acrylic on canvas
94×118 in -
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End of Safety: Compliance
2021.
Graphite and acrylic on Arches paper
60×40 in -
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End of Safety: Compliance
2021.
Graphite and acrylic on Arches paper
60×40 in -
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End of Safety: Ignorance
2024.
Graphite and acrylic on Arches paper
60×40 in -
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End of Safety: Innocence
2021.
Graphite and acrylic on Arches paper
60×40 in -
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End of Safety: Silence
2021.
Graphite and acrylic on canvas
60×40 in -
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End of Safety: Patience
2021.
Graphite and acrylic on Arches paper
60×40 in -
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End of Safety: Veil
(Ed. of 3) 2023.
Cast resin
70×39×49 in
