Exhibitions
FAHAMU PECOU: THIS FACE BEHIND THIS MASK BEHIND THIS SKIN
Frist Art Museum / 919 Broadway October 10, 2025 - January 4, 2026
Fahamu Pecou
The Frist Art Museum presents This Face Behind This Mask Behind This Skin, a survey exhibition of recent work by Dr. Fahamu Pecou, an interdisciplinary artist and scholar whose work bridges hip-hop, fine art, and popular culture to examine contemporary representations in Black culture. Organized by the Frist Art Museum, the exhibition will be on view in the Frist’s Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery from October 10, 2025 through January 4, 2026.
Through paintings, performance art, and academic work, Pecou confronts the social construct of Black masculinity and Black identity, challenging and expanding the reading, performance, and expressions of Blackness. This exhibition surveys his recent bodies of work End Of Safety, Real Negus Don’t Die, and We Didn’t Realize We Were Seeds and debuts a multichannel video installation featuring his short Afro-Surrealist film The Store.
Concurrently on view in the Frist’s Ingram Gallery is New African Masquerades: Artistic Innovations and Collaborations, which highlights the stories of four contemporary West African masquerade artists. “Together, Fahamu Pecou’s exhibition and New African Masquerades present each artist’s distinct contemporary approaches, with shared throughlines coalescing into a broader Pan-African expression—one that honors ancestral knowledge while shaping new contributions to cultural discourse,” writes Frist Art Museum Associate Curator Michael J. Ewing. “Seeing the shows together invites viewers to first consider Pecou as a performance artist—his photographed performances are later transcribed into paintings—offering insight into them not as self-portraits or autobiographical works, but as masquerades or embodiments of larger expressions rooted in African cosmology.”
Image: Fahamu Pecou. End of Safety: Illusion, 2023. Acrylic on canvas; 36 x 72 in. Courtesy of BackSlash Gallery, Paris. Image courtesy of the artist. © Fahamu Pecou
