Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century’ marks 50 years of hip hop

The 50^th anniversary of hip hop culture is upon us, and with it, several timely celebrations and tributes. The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21^st Century is a particularly expansive art exhibition in the United States, that is accompanied by a substantial catalogue of the same name. The exhibition is co-organised by the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and is co-curated by Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director, Gamynne Guillotte, the BMA’s Chief Education Officer, along with Hannah Klemm and Andréa Purnell, who are SLAM’s Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Audience Development Manager respectively. The Culture was initially launched at the BMA on 5 April, and concluded its showing there on 16 July. It subsequently opened at the SLAM on 25 August, where it will run through 1 January, 2024.

The catalogue’s book design was undertaken by Elizabeth Karp-Evans and Adam Turnbull of the studio Pacific, and the book features contributions from over 40 creatives and writers across more than 300 pages. This opulent tome is published by Gregory R. Miller and Co., and is edited by Naeem, while the other three co-curators feature in its introduction. The book, like the exhibition it accompanies, explores beyond music and the performing arts, and examines the politics and fashion sensibilities associated with hip hop as a movement and lived culture, along with its relationship with contemporary art.

The pages of The Culture are richly adorned with over 70 works by leading artists such as Tschabalala Self, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hank Willis Thomas as well as fashion design and art objects by brands such as Gucci and Louis Vuitton. To quote Naeem from the book’s introduction “This exhibition and its accompanying volume bring the pulsing energy of hip hop into a visual art space, embracing hip-hop’s fluid edges and showing its reach into art, music and culture around the world, writ large.”

The curators Klemm and Purnell introduce the monumental show and publication, saying: “Hip hop emerged as a transnational and multidisciplinary aesthetic form originated by Black, Latinx and Afro-Latinx youth in the 1970s and over the past 50 years has evolved into a set of creative practices that produce alternate systems of power, even as they critique, celebrate, and refuse dominant ones. The Culture addresses many of the contemporary conversations surrounding the art form including but not limited to gender and sexuality, race and class, appropriation, and technological advances in the music industry, mapping these expressions across an array of perspectives.”

The duo explains that the last two decades have provided African American and Latinx communities an unprecedented ability to document, circulate, and give voice to what they experience and what they make, through emergent, commercially available technologies. This has, in turn, bolstered hip hop’s position as a cultural element that enables these communities to feel understood, manifest a sense of belonging, and express their social aspirations. As Klemm and Purnell tell STIR, “The Culture examines hip hop’s ability to create alternate systems of power.”

The Culture publication also retells obscured communal histories. Take the essay “Follow Me into a Solo: Further Ruminations on Hip Hop and Black Politics” by Lester Spence, a professor of political sciences at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore for example: it places Rapper’s Delight (1979) by The Sugarhill Gang, which is a foundational song for rap music, within its era, using it as an example of the music that arose among Black and Latinx youth living in the austere economic conditions of New York City at the time. Spence follows this thread further and connects rap and hip hop to the 1973 counter-revolution in Chile, which gave New York City bankers impetus to encourage austerity measures within the city. He explains that as a part of Generation X, which he also refers to as the “hip hop generation”, he and his peers had no idea that Rappers Delight and the fledgling sound of its time would capture the far-reaching consequences that political events beyond American borders had for his community, and furthermore, that the birth of rap music tied the American Black and Latinx communities to the culture of another nation.

In collecting and presenting the sizable volume of written and visual works that The Culture contains, the curatorial team sheds light on an intricate history that intertwines nations, peoples, art, music, and politics. Klemm and Purnell frame the exhibition and catalogue as a continuation of hip-hop’s legacy of half a century. They also explain that the team grappled extensively with how best to frame their subject matter early on in their shared undertaking. They tell STIR: “We all quickly knew that we didn’t want to strive to create a history of hip hop and visual art, rather for us the focus became on the myriad ways that hip hop culture influenced contemporary artists and contemporary visual culture, specifically over the last 20 years.” They conclude: “We hope that the works in this exhibition showcase some of the many ways that hip hop as a cultural phenomenon has truly transformed our world.”