The Baltimore Museum of Art recently opened up its new exhibit dedicated to hip-hop and its influence.
Titled “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” the exhibit showcases more than 90 pieces of artwork by modern celebrated artists. Amongst the artists featured are Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, Julie Mehretu and Carrie Mae Weems.
Through paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures and video, the exhibit focuses on discussing hip hop’s presence in culture. The artwork pays tribute to Black women in hip-hop, rappers such as Jay Z, as well as the fashion style of hip-hop giants like Lil Kim and Pharrell Williams. The works of fashion designers such as Virgil Abloh are also a key part of the exhibit.
“Hip hop’s influence is so significant that it has become the new canon—an alternate set of ideals of artistic beauty and excellence centered on the Afro-Latinx identities and histories—and one that rivals the Western art historical canon around which many museums orient and develop exhibitions,” said co-curator Asma Naeem per an official statement.
“Whether through the poetics of the street, the blurring of high and low, the reclamation of the gaze, the homage to hip-hop geniuses, or the experimental collaborations across such vastly disparate fields as painting, performance, fashion, architecture, and computer programming, the visual culture of hip hop along with its subversive tactics and its tackling of social justice surface everywhere in the art of today.”
The opening of the exhibit comes in time to celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. Although hip hop began in the early 1970s with roots in Jamaican practices of “toasting,” DJ Kool Herc’s Aug. 11, 1973 block party. On that night, DJ Kool Herc, often considered as the “Father of Hip Hop,” debuted a new technique that would soon become a staple of the hip-hop genre.
Dubbed the “Merry-Go Round” technique by himself, DJ Kool Herc created breakbeats by using two turntables to elongate certain parts of funk songs; through the system featuring the two turntables, he was able to switch between the two playing the same disc, extending the breakbeat.
Although the Aug. 11, 1973, back-to-school block party was not the first place that Herc debuted the technique, the event marked the use of the technique in front of the biggest crowd using the best sound system available to him; the party set the groundwork for what would officially be known as “hip hop” six years later.
