The first Saturday of September brings another fabulous series of Art Crawls to the area. Prime amongst them are the Downtown and the Wedgewood/Houston crawls. Saturday, September 6 is the closing date for ‘Fahamu Pecou: Artist and Scholar,’ a not-to-be-missed limited-engagement exhibition at the Arts Company, downtown on the 5th Avenue of the Arts.

Fahamu Pecou’s artwork provides a crucial examination of contemporary representations of Black masculinity. Pecou began his career experimenting with the branding strategies employed in hip-hop music and entertainment. These experiments ultimately led him to question not only the stereotypes engendered by the commodification of hip-hop culture, but more, to consider how the influence of historic and social configurations of race, class and gender impact and inform these representations. Fahamu Pecou is a visual artist and scholar whose work combines observations on hip-hop, fine art and popular culture.

Pecou’s paintings, performance art, and academic work address issues around contemporary representations of Black masculinity and how these images impact both the reading and performance of Black masculinity. Currently a Ph.D. student in Emory University’s Institute of Liberal Arts (ILA), Pecou maintains an active exhibition schedule as well as public lectures and speaking engagements at colleges and museums around the world.

In addition, the gallery will introduce ‘Robin Schlacter: Encaustics,’ along with ‘Jim Hubbman: Watercolor and Graphite,’ both opening during The First Saturday Art Crawl Downtown, on September 6, 6 pm-9 pm, and continuing through September 26, at 215 Fifth Avenue of the Arts. For more information, visit .

Over the years, Jim Hubbman has gathered stories and observations, which he has incorporated into his paintings. His artistic passion is to create meticulous works on paper in watercolor and graphite. He sets up scenarios mixing unlike objects to communicate the way we communicate in our contemporary culture, typically putting total opposites next to each other to establish a different way of seeing.

Robin P. Schlacter is a printmaker and painter with a love of color. She creates vibrant oil-based monotypes on paper and combined media paintings which are rich with color and texture. Her non-representational expressions create windows of color using gestural line, collage of textures and layers of intense hues which have been carefully blended. Her images resonate with movement and positive energy.

Over at David Lusk Gallery, 516 Hagan Street in the Wedgewood/Houston district, catch Memphis artist Jared Small’s first solo exhibition there. Small grew up in Memphis. He’s familiar with decaying homes and neighborhoods. They’ve always fascinated him. He depicts those structures (showing the rotting paint, sagging rooflines, and broken windows) in a heartily realistic manner that dissolves into abstraction as it eases toward the edges of his paintings on panel. In his current work, rather than merely recreate images of dilapidated buildings or intriguing individuals, he pushes each painting to tell a more apparent, allegorical story. His monumental allegorical work, True Blues, was recently included as part of the new Nashville Music City Center’s prestigious permanent collection.