The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jelani Cobb Talks with the Artist Fahamu Pecou

Episode Date: July 23, 2019

Fahamu Pecou has shown work in museums all over the country and appeared on television shows like “Empire” and “black-ish.” The men the artist depicts tend to strike exaggerated poses, with sagging bluejeans and a cascade of colorful boxer shorts. Pecou gained notoriety in Atlanta, for a poster campaign bearing the legend “Fahamu Pecou Is the Shit.” The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb notes that Pecou “has the ability to deal with themes that relate primarily to black male identity in the U.S.,” including stereotypes and police violence, “while injecting a very subversive element of humor.” Cobb went to Atlanta to meet with Pecou and spoke with him about the influence of African tradition on his life and work.  L. D. Brown of Grey Reverend contributed music for this story. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Fahamu Pecu is an artist whose work has been seen in museums across the country, and maybe just as importantly, his paintings have appeared on television in shows including Empire and Blackish. The men he depicts tend to strike exaggerated poses with sagging jeans, in a cascade of colorful boxer shorts.

Some are aggressively smoking cigars or holding glocks. The works are complex statements about stereotype and identity. And Jolani Cobb, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a big fan. I've known Fahamu Picu for about 12 years. I actually have a painting of his that hangs on the wall on my living room, and it's a piece called And Still I Rise. and it really encapsulates a lot of what I'd like about his work. He has the ability to deal with themes that relate primarily to black male identity in the United States.

You know, police violence and premature death and the way people are often viewed as a vector of danger or any of things that we associate with black men in the society. And he is able to grapple with those questions. in all of their seriousness while also injecting a very element of humor into it. Back in June, I went to talk to Fahamu in Atlanta where I used to live when I taught at Spelman College. Further down the street,

Abernathy turns into Cascade Road. And Cascade Road has long been a community of affluent African-American figures, business leaders, doctors, politicians, et cetera. So there's a really, really rich black history in this particular community. So do you think Atlanta

has been central to your work? Would you have done the same sort of thing in a different place? I don't know that I would have or could have even. When I really started traveling with my work, I really began to recognize just how unique and

beautiful Atlanta was and how influential it had been because of, you know, Atlanta being the city that's always been considered like this black mecca. There's been times I've traveled, you know, to cities, you know, and for two or three days, the only black person I saw was my reflection in the mirror. Atlanta's really helped me see the beauty in my blackness and to see the diversity of blackness, what blackness can be.

For lunch, we went to a place called R. Thomas. If you live in Atlanta for any period of time, you know, that there's not a lot of late-night eating options. And R. Thomas is the place that you go after a late night at the club, you know, or just the middle of the night you decided you're hungry. As a matter of fact, I don't know that I'd ever been there before 11 p.m. until we went to lunch. What do you get here? Various things. You know, I think another reason that I like coming here, too, is I'm primarily vegan. It also has vegan options. For many years, this was one of the few restaurants in the city where you can go as a vegan and find something that you could eat.

In Atlanta, that's saying a whole lie. I don't think I've ever met anyone else named Fahamu. As a matter of fact, I know I've never met anyone else named Fahmuh. Where does your name come from? The name is Swahili. It means understanding. My parents were well into the Pan-Africanist movement in the 60s and 70s, you know. So all of my siblings, we all have names from the continent.

But when I was maybe like eight or nine, my dad who would have been institutionalized after my mom died called, and I'd never thought of this before, but he was like, do you know what your name means? And I was like, my name means something? You know, and he told me your name means understanding, you know, and that gave me a whole different view on my life at that point. I became really fascinated with anything that had to do with Africa. Like, I wanted to know more. The fascination with Africa continued and became a theme into his adulthood, and especially as he became an artist. As a matter of fact, you can see that in his new exhibit, Do or Die,

which is inspired by the Yorba and Ifah traditions of West Africa. There's a group of paintings called Agoon Dance, and they show a dancing figure and a face mask that's made of small white cowrie shells. The shells symbolize wealth. As a matter of fact, they were once used as currency in West Africa. He's also pairing these august West African-African spiritual themes with African-American urban motifs. The figure whose dancing is actually wearing a hoodie in sweatpants. And notably, that hoodie in those sweatpants are white.

In the Ifah tradition, white symbolizes healing. In Ifah, you don't die. You transition back into the realm of the end. ancestors where you are, again, amongst, you know, spirits, you know, and you can return, right? And so there's a kind of power in this idea that your spirit is not ended, right? Your physical form may end, but you continue. The spirits that he's talking about in the do-a-die series are the spirits of African-American men who've died at the hands of police.

And more specifically, Fahamu was responding to the death of Walter Scott in 2015. in North Charleston, South Carolina. It's specifically created to venerate the spirits of those individuals who've been killed by racial violence. And so it speaks to, you know, young men and boys who've been killed by police violence. It speaks to people who were assassinated during the civil rights movement. It speaks to people who were lynched during Jim Crow era. So you see all the names of these men, they become, they move from being victims. to be honored ancestors.

Hi, who are you? I think I'm going to go with the Thai bowl. Yeah, with Samin Can I say. So now we are about to turn on to Oakland Drive where my new studio is. So I'm kind of on the border of... During a trip to Havana, Fahamo got a call saying that his studio had caught fire.

He lost paintings, he lost materials, and he lost some of his own private art collection. Just this past January, he moved into a new studio, and he showed me around. When we pull up, you ought to bear it with me because I'm going to have to jump out to open the gate. So when I got the building, it still looked like 1956. There was wood paneling everywhere and those green tiles that you would have seen in like your school, you know, hallways and stuff like that. So I basically gutted the entire building and kind of redid the inside. So this turned into my office and I have a little gallery space or showroom here. When Fahamu was first trying to establish himself as an artist in Atlanta,

he worked as a graphic designer and did campaigns for hip-hop artists. Then an idea came to him. You know, what would happen if somebody marketed a visual artist the same way we do a hip-hop artist? He came up with this brilliant, un-oarctic. orthodox and slightly scatological thing, which is actually what first brought him to my attention. He put up posters all around the city of Atlanta with the slogan, Fahamu Piku is the shit. And the posters just had this graphic illustration of me with no shirt on trying to look real hard and tough. And it said Fahamu Peku is the shit.

And they're on the bottom paid for by the committee to make Fahmu Peku officially the shit. As soon as I started putting the posters up, it was like an immediate reaction. You know, people would come up to me on the street like, hey, man, are you that shit guy? This idea of promoting himself led to a series of paintings of him on the cover of art magazines. He was satirizing hip-hop to a certain extent, but he was also making fun of an art world that he felt excluded from. I very deliberately created like these magazine covers, like using magazine covers like Art Form and Art News and Art in America and these very like high profile sort of like, you know, uppity, you know, kinds of publications.

But juxtaposing it with this character that are created and like a whole bunch of like swag and like attitude and, you know, crotch grabbing and throwing up the middle finger and stuff like that. And, you know, and I tell people all the time because people are like, You only paint yourself. And I'm like, I don't paint myself at all. I use my body, but it's not me. People see me or they engage with me and they realize that, okay, wait, this, yeah, that looks like him, but that's not the same. That happens everywhere I go.

They're like, oh, you're actually quiet. Oh, you're not as tall as I thought you would be. Oh, you're actually smart. You know what I mean? Like, what, you know, so that's always kind of fascinating. So there are some themes that jump out at you with his work. Black identity, masculinity, violence, celebrity culture, but there are other themes to his work that I think aren't as easily apparent.

I, for instance, knew that his work came from a very personal place in addition to his political convictions. In fact, his first show, which was his senior thesis project at the Atlanta College of Art, deals with his memories of an intensely traumatic moment in his child. childhood. When I was four years old, my father who was suffering from schizophrenia had an episode and he ended up killing my mom. And my siblings and I were all present at the time. We were all there. We were all, you know, basically witness to it. And after, you know, father, you know, did what he did. He ran out of the room. He told us to run like it's time to run. And he marched us all to the police

station and he went to the death sergeant, told him what he did, and turned himself in. And, you know, my siblings and I were kind of taken away and we were for a little while, wards of the state, and then we were sent off to live with relatives in South Carolina. And, you know, no one ever talked to us about that. There was never like counseling. There was no, you know, how do you feel? Like no one said, like it was like nobody said anything. We, you know, it was just like your dad kill your mom and that's it, you know.

So you remember that moment from when you were four. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And in fact, it's like the most, the first and one of the most vivid memories that I have. When Fahamu was a junior in college, he found himself listening to Goody Mob's album soul food. And on that album is a song called Guess Who. And in that song, everybody in the group talks about the impact of their mother's love and how their mother's love saved them or, you know, help them through their lives. And as I said, you know, I lost my mom at four, but I always

felt her hand in everything that I did. And I remember that I had this box. It's a, it's a like wooden box. And I remember that box used to sit in the corner of my room. So as I'm just kind of picked up this box and I start like making, you know, and, you know, creating something. And when I kind of came out of whatever thing I was in, whatever zone I was in, in front of me I had come turn this box into Minkisi. So Minkis are these vessels that house spirits. And so I turned this box into a Minkisi that represented my mom. mom's spirit. And it sent me down this rabbit hole because now I'm like, there's something to this. Like I felt a kind of a little lighter after I created that. He never really talked with his siblings

about that night. But the next time he saw them, he got them to write down what they remembered about the night their mother died. When I got back to school, I began to take those stories that they had shared with me and make this body of work that retold the story of the night that my mom died, but from the perspective of each of the four of us. And that became my senior exhibition. Anyway, the night that the show opened, I saw, you know, people come in and they're reading the stories and they're looking at the work and, you know, and I'm watching people react to this work. I mean, people are crying, you know, people were coming up to me like, hey, you know, I haven't spoken to my brother in 15 years and your work has made me want to reach out and reconnect.

and healed that or, you know, I was abused as a child and your work is giving me the courage to, you know, to face that. And I remember standing back watching and realizing this is art. This is what I want to do. And that's how I kind of discovered my voice as an artist through that experience. Has your father seen your work? Yeah, yeah. He hasn't seen that work in particular, but You know, my father has been institutionalized since, you know, since that time. But in 2010, I had this show in New York and reached out to my father because we at that point had developed a relationship where we, you know, spoke over the phone and stuff like that. And he was able to get permission and was escorted to the gallery to see the show. But he was really moved by it.

And I never forget, he was like, your mother would be really proud. You know, yeah. Artist for Hamu Peku, talking in Atlanta with the New Yorker's Jolani Ka. A show of Pecku's work called Do or Die is at the African American Museum

in Philadelphia. I'm David Remnick, and that's our show for today. Thanks for joining us and have a great week. Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by L.D. Brown. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, Kalalia, David Krasnell, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino,

with help from Andres O'Hara, Robert Jimison, Mung Faye Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.