American artist Fahamu Pecou laid the foundations many years ago for an artistic manifesto in which painting asserts itself as a territory for deconstructing and reconfiguring dominant narratives surrounding Black identity, at the intersection of history, popular culture, and contemporary imaginaries.

The exhibition b(eye)rth r(eye)ght celebrates vision as an inalienable, intimate, and sovereign birthright. The title operates as both a visual and semantic declaration: by inserting the word eye at the heart of birthright, it proclaims that the way each of us sees is our most absolute inheritance.

Through a true creation narrative, the works bring contemporary figures into dialogue with African sculptural forms, elevating these ancestral objects to the status of companions and witnesses to the unfolding of Black futures. Far from calls for justification or political resistance, the exhibition claims the fundamental right to pleasure, rest, and beauty for their own sake. It offers a powerful invitation to Black people to reclaim their own ways of seeing and to reinvent themselves, not through the eyes of others, but according to their own visions.

Fahamu Pecou holds a PhD in Philosophy and is a Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters. His work has been exhibited at numerous prestigious institutions around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art and the High Museum in Atlanta, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Ludwig Foundation in Vienna and the Yokohama Museum of Art in Japan, among many others. His works are held in numerous collections, including MUMOK in Austria, the Seattle Art Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, The West Collection in Philadelphia, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Société Générale Collection in France, Google, and CBH Bank in Switzerland.