A small art supply store that sells everything you need and then some!
A small art supply store that sells everything you need and then some!
And I'll give us a clap. My name is Fahamun Peku. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and I live and work in Atlanta, Georgia. I don't really know what it means to be Southern because Southern is not a monolith. It's not a thing. It's not one thing. It can be many things. I think that many people have different paths and different interpretations of the South. And what that means and what it represents, what it looks I hope that you will feel It's actually literally inspired by a song from Outkast, a song called Aquamanite, on an alb And there's a line in the song where Andre 3000 talks about the kind of despair and hopelessness of growing up in the South for children and stuff. And he says this line I often felt I always felt different, And, And they did it with no shame. They did it with no They walked with their heads held high and they told stories about Wreckley dirt and, you know, playing in the woods and, you know, eating oatmeal in a l They told stories about their unique experience of being in the South. And that gave me confidence to tell my own story and also to want to be able to tell my story in a way that could be as impactful as the stories that they told. One of the things that I do in my work is I, in many respects, I take on the misconceptions and stereotypes I perform them and exaggerate them as a way of getting us to critically engage with them. I think especially because of the way media works, we often look at the products of media without really thinking about what it is that we're looking at, without challenging what it is that we look at. We just accept it. I'm particularly interested in the types of images that inform young black boys, especially, but black people in general, in terms of what blackness looks like, Oh, that's what a black person looks That's what I'm going to do because now I see myself reflected in this person. And so I'm interested in mining those kinds of representations as a way of, again, getting us to critically engage with those things and think about not just how we'reacting to them, but how they ultimately shape how we see and think about ourselves.
