Writings
Dr. Pecou’s writing moves between critical essay, cultural analysis, and poetic reflection, extending his visual practice into language as a site of inquiry. His texts interrogate Black identity, masculinity, style, and memory, drawing from hip-hop, art history, and lived experience to produce work that is both intellectually rigorous and deeply felt.
His essays and writings have appeared in publications such as Atlanta Magazine, NBC News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution as well as exhibition catalogues, interdisciplinary platforms, and academic texts such as the James Baldwin Review and Global Impact: A Hip-Hop Reader.
From catalog essays to ongoing reflections on Substack—his writing operates as both mirror and method: a space where Black cultural production is not only documented, but theorized, challenged, and reimagined in real time.
Bastards of the Party: Of Kinship, Conflict and the Ghosts of Revolution
Featured on Substack, May 28, 2025
Excerpt:
BASTARDS OF THE PARTY is both prayer and provocation. A memorial and a mirror. It holds space for mourning while making a case for redemption. And in doing so, it also becomes an indictment. Not of the boys caught in the spiral of street life, but of the systems that constructed the spiral. The government conspiracies that introduced drugs into our neighborhoods. The policies that fuel mass incarceration. The surveillance programs that crushed our movements. The cultural machinery that glamorizes our destruction while criminalizing our pain.
This piece refuses a simplistic or polarizing narrative. It says: look again. These boys are not your enemy. They are what’s left of a dream deferred and they may yet be the key to a dream renewed.
Memory as Medicine
Featured in the exhibition catalogue for Forest Figures by Alexis Peskine
Excerpt:
“Contemplating Peskine’s latest work, I am reminded of the words of the Anthropologist, Dr. Marimba Ani:
Both spiritual and material being are necessary in order for there to be a meaningful reality. While spiritual being gives force and energy to matter, material being gives form to spirit. Enlightenment and the acquisition of wisdom and knowledge depend to a significant degree on being able to apprehend spirit in matter.
This principle resonates deeply through Alexis’ recent works. Each “figure” portrayed radiates ethereal qualities through the multipotent nature of the raw materials used; the unflinching transparency of his model’s gaze; and the palpable energy invested in their construction; all of which combine to startling effect. Peskine does not, as many painters do, merely create the illusion of his subject: he actively invokes the essence of his chosen materials to conjure the spirit of the sitter in our presence.”
One’uh My Heroes
Featured in Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the the Frick
Edited by Aimee Ng and Antwaun Sargent, 2023
Excerpt:
“Birth of the Cool was Barkley Hendricks' seminal and, in many ways, his revival in the contemporary art world. Entering the galleries, I was immediately seized by his striking portraits of casual Black beauty, style, and grace. Much of the work was from the 1960s and 1970s. These portraits were unapologetic in their representation of the Blackness of that era; newsboy caps, flowing trench coats, bell-bottom jeans, platform shoes, afros, swagger and soul! Each of his subjects was beautifully composed and elevated to the highest artistic standards. Barkley's colors and attention to the most minute details kept me rapt. I studied every stroke, attempting to track the movement of his hand across the canvasses. I had not seen work like this before, fine art that centered and elevated what some might consider a ghetto aesthetic.”