T̶h̶e̶y̶ We Didn't Realize We Were Seeds: We The Roses: Fahamu Pecou

“Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared,” wrote Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971–2006) in the poem The Rose That Grew from Concrete, which was published posthumously in an autobiographical collection of poetry written between 1989 and 1991. Resounding from this final line of prose, the lives of Shakur and Fahamu Pecou find kinship. The 1980s saw the rise of hip-hop and the historic emergence of Black political representation—benchmarks of Black society. Though these notable events would become fodder for the artists each of these young men would become, the same decade's challenges with mental illness among Black men and the rampant cocaine epidemic brought personal tragedies that would reshape the course of their destinies. At the age of four a young Pecou, having lost both parents on one unspeakable night in Brooklyn, found refuge in sketches, doodles, cartoons, and comics until refuge became survival, and survival became the first vestiges of a lifelong pursuit of self-expression through image-making. At the same time that Shakur began what would become one of the most important rap and activist careers of the 20th century, Pecou began selling his first serialized comic featuring the great avenger, Black Man, the alter ego of the fictional character Ahmad — who bore a striking resemblance to the boy who had created him.

Growing up, Pecou traversed the East Coast from Brooklyn to Hartsville, South Carolina, finally landing in Atlanta in 1993 to attend the Atlanta College of Art and take painting classes in the independent study program at Spelman College, where he came under the tutelage of Dr. Arturo Lindsay. This mentorship, along with the burgeoning hip-hop scene, proved formative for Pecou. Artists such as OutKast, CeeLo Green, Goodie Mob, and Arrested Development were expanding hip-hop into a new territory, conscious rap, which was divorced from the gangsta narrative and instead focused on unity, Black empowerment, and the pursuit of knowledge. Under these conditions, what began as the comic book superhero Black Man evolved into large-scale canvases of the artist’s own alter ego. This new subject, donned in garb typically associated with contemporary urban Black men, is juxtaposed and conversed with a plethora of African masks, sculptures, and traditional forms of dress. The figures were stylized in poses that exuded an unabashed swagger redefined by the artist’s experience in this new metropolis—the “Black Mecca.” Through this transformation into a bona fide artist, Pecou became the very superhero he had drawn during his childhood.

The work belongs to the artist’s Real NEGUS Don’t Die series, harkening back to the crusader Pecou envisioned as a child. However, as he has expanded the pantheon of archetypes his work presents over his career, he has also deepened the ways in which he foregrounds the legacies of those heroes who have passed on. The subject’s shirt features Tupac’s likeness, and these graphic t-shirts, the Afrotrope within the series, serve as sites of memorialization and remembrance, resisting the reductive narratives of victimhood and trauma often associated with death. The late rapper’s visage infuses the composition with a duality of roles: he is both the son who inherited the burden of a complex legacy and a harbinger of truth and transformation. Directly across from it in the exhibition, “Dear Mama” conjures a pre-birth Madonna and Child-like figure—a pregnant mother dressed in a similar t-shirt with a portrait of Afeni Shakur gazing across the room at her son in “Concrete Rose”.

Throughout his career, Pecou’s rigorous inquiry into the genesis of style and modes of expression within Black culture led him to investigate their very origins. Through his personal exploration of his ancestral heritage, he traced his DNA back to his African roots. He thus began his journey as a practitioner of the Yoruba faith, which expanded his research into traditions originating across Sub-Saharan Africa. For the Congo people of the region, sacred medicine and divine protection are central to their system of belief. Pecou, by meticulously building each symbol, motif, and icon, one embedded into another, transforms his paintings, drawings, and sculptures into totems. Introduced in the second gallery of his three-part exhibition, two semi-transparent resin cast sculptures, molded from a traditional power figure or “Nkisi” of the Congo people and pierced with bright, gold-plated needles adorned with Adinkra symbols, float against fluorescent mandorlas. Facing one another across the gallery space, these works, titled “Keep What’s in My Safe, Safe”, operate similarly to the first tondo in the Real NEGUS Don't Die series, “Pour Le Peuple”, in that while these works address the care and safeguarding of Black history and traditions, Pecou infuses them with the material culture of contemporary life. Resin-drenched Crown Royal bags overflowing with cowrie shells spill their precious charms onto the very shelves suspending them in space — an offering. Together, these figures and their various adornments create a bridge that reveals how these traditions have been recycled across time and geography, manifesting themselves in the rites and rituals of communities across the African diaspora—not as entirely new, but inherited.

With historic ties throughout many parts of the world as currency, including in China since the 7th century BCE and in India since the 5th century AD, in the 16th century the cowrie shell was also circulated for the same purpose across the African continent. Later, during the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, the price of enslaved people was quoted in cowries, only later to become crucial to the acquisitions and display of social and political status. Though the shell was most commonly used for trade, Pecou, through an alchemical process of transformation, repurposing, and juxtaposition, often beckons for truth and origin and reasserts the cowrie’s employment in ritual and divination practices in many West African societies — rituals then carried across the Atlantic to the Americas. In a diptych of drawings, “As Above” and “So Below”, tiny fingernail-sized gold-plated shells imbue the pieces with the specter of the cowrie’s historic significance and function while situating the symbol within the present moment. These expressionistic drawings are characteristic of the artist’s various series, such as those that began Real NEGUS Don’t Die.  An anonymous figure’s upper body is exposed in “As Above” and obscured in “So Below”.  Dressed in a skirt of raffia, once the most common textile in all of Africa, Pecou takes this opportunity to liken the ceremonial garment and its traditionally lush decoration to one of contemporary black culture’s most iconic touchstones, the Nike “swoosh.” Popularized in 1985 by the brand’s release of the first Air Jordan, Pecou weaves the emblem in and out of the skirts’ palm fibers, just above a set of nine variations of the sneaker. The assembly of the famous brand of sneakers worn by the illusory protagonist are more than just the record of Nike’s sponsorship of black athlete’s – they are a chronology of a lineage of black creators whose lives wove aspiration into inspiration. Like each “swoosh”, and the parade of Air Jordans -- a single line of cowrie shells dangles from the bottom of each work, sown into the bottom of the drawings, each with a single knot, like tiny incantations. These multifaceted references illustrate, capture and amplify the complex cultural depth of African American identity, reflecting Pecou's belief that “making connections between African cultural retentions and contemporary expressions of Blackness is about showing that we are more than what the world has suggested or imposed upon us”.

The birth of his children, daughter Oji and son Ngozi, prompted Fahamu to embark on a more introspective journey, exploring how the identities of Black youth are shaped by both inherited legacies and the broader cultural influences imposed upon them. Why schools in America would rather regulate backpacks than guns was a question that catalyzed the creation of vitrinal works that meet the viewer as they enter the exhibition. Clear backpacks, the very ones mandated by schools to monitor the belongings of Black youth on school campuses, are hung directly from schoolhouse hooks on the wall, waiting to be claimed. However, the contents of one of the packs in the series, Louis Knapsack Where I’m Holding All the Work At, “Louis II, A Dream Conferred”, a can of Arizona Tea and a lone bag of Skittles, both of which were the last requests from the 7-Eleven clerk by Trayvon Martin before he was fatally shot by a neighborhood watch coordinator who was suspicious of the young black man’s posture and dress as he walked back to his father's finacee's home – a classic case of racial profiling. Here, Pecou captures the essence of the complexities of Black identity and the ongoing struggle against societal stereotypes. Pecou’s incorporation of an almost blood-stained resin Yoruba sculpture behind the array of snacks and a scattering of cowrie shells celebrates both agency and power — beauty and ancestral pride. Through this juxtaposition, he confronts the white supremacist narratives that seek to dehumanize Blackness. The series not only pays homage to figures like Martin but also uses the clear backpacks as a prism to reveal the vulnerabilities of a community constantly under attack, while simultaneously reflecting the enduring resilience and aesthetic of cool—the embodiment of cultural continuity rooted in Blackness.

At the heart of the exhibition stands “The Rose that Grew Thru Concrete,” a towering twelve-foot monument that dominates the gallery like an apparition of defiance and reverence. Crafted from stacks of boxers draped with gold chains and adorned with miniature Air Jordan charms, the work is crowned with a single vine of roses and features a pair of jeans embellished with cowries sewn into the hem and pockets—elements that seem to echo various pieces throughout the show. This piece serves as a testament to the history of sagging in Black culture. Rooted in the hip-hop generation, sagging reflects a bold counter to past norms, evolving from the tight leather pants and shelltoe Adidas of icons like Run DMC to the oversized, baggy styles of the 90s. As scholar Ivory Toldson notes in Fahamu’s essay “So Low You Can’t Get Over It: Oppositional Fashion and the Politics of Sagging,” sagging emerged as a response to social dynamics, where wearing pants low became a means of asserting identity and rebelling against certain stereotypes. This act of defiance transformed a baggy style into an affirmation of youthful Black pride, pushing back against conservative conventions. Adopted by hip-hop artists like Ice-T and the group C.I.A., this cultural signifier permeated the mainstream, only to be later vilified and policed as it became synonymous with Blackness, subjected to systemic profiling and prohibition. Yet in Pecou’s “The Rose that Grew Through Concrete,” sagging is exalted—no longer a subjugated gesture but a towering proclamation of Black pride, a reclamation of power in the face of marginalization.

The work, with its towering stilts that recall the Moko Jumbies of Caribbean Carnival, seems to spring from the earth itself, as though drawn upward by the weight of history and the spirit of survival. Pecou’s intricate layering of past and present, struggle and transcendence, transforms “The Rose that Grew Thru Concrete,” into both altar and sentinel, a protector of culture and a beacon of resilience. Its legs, extended on stilts, evoke the supernatural guardianship of the Jumbies, whose height allows them to see beyond the present, tethered to ancestral wisdom yet transcendent in their view of the future.

In Dr. Fahamu Pecou’s imagining, this exhibition and in fact, his entire practice, becomes a Black-history phantasmagoria, drawing from the boundless reservoir of source material within the Black Universe.