Baltimore Museum Of Art Tracks Hip Hop’s Rise From Sub-Culture To ‘The Culture’

“The Culture” began on street corners in the Bronx during the 1970s. That street culture, Black culture, expanded to encompass the culture of cities–urban culture. Having taken over cities, “the culture”–hip hop–spread across America, becoming the dominant cultural influence nationwide over the past 25 years.

Not done there, still growing after a half century, “the culture”–hip hop–now represents the driving force behind global contemporary music, fashion, art and language trends.

An exhibition opened this month at the Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century,” treats hip hop’s roots, impact and essential figures with the same intellectual rigor and prestige it would a presentation of ancient Egypt, Greece or Rome. Rightly so. In their time, that was “the culture.” Today, hip hop is “the culture.”

Not a niche. Not a sub-culture. The culture.

As such, it deserves and demands study and display in those spaces designed to preserve and highlight culture: museums. Preeminent museums like the BMA, where the exhibition will be on view through July 16, 2023, and the Saint Louis Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario where it will travel in turn.

“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 around the Afro-Latinx identities and histories—and one that rivals the Western art historical canon around which many museums orient and develop exhibitions,” co-curated by Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Chief Curator and Interim Co-Director, said when announcing the show.

“The Culture” features more than 90 works of art by some of today’s most important and celebrated artists including Derrick Adams, Mark Bradford, Julie Mehretu, Tschabalala Self, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems. As Naeem states, they, along with their colleagues, are creating the new canon of Western art.

They are to the late 20^th and 21^st century what Da Vinci, Botticelli, Dürer, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bosch, Bruegel and Raphael were to the late 15^th and 16^th centuries, or the Cubists, Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists were to the early and mid-20^th.

Hip hop, however, encompasses vastly more than fine art, breadth represented in “The Culture.”

“It is (hard) to draw boundaries around what hip hop represents, as its reach is so broad and has shifted so much over the past 50 years, but I think the exhibition makes clear that hip hop is an undeniable global force manifested in music, dance, fashion, technology, the performing arts and Contemporary art,” Naeem told Forbes.com.

From the sneakers on your feet, to the music in your ears and the words coming out of your mouth, virtually no piece of American or global culture hasn’t been influenced by hip hop.

Origins and Expansion

Hip hop first emerged as music from Black, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx Americans living in the Bronx in the 1970s. It quickly proliferated through large-scale block parties to encompass an entire culture that includes the four pillars of MCing or rapping; DJing; breakdancing; and graffiti writing and arts.

From its inception, hip hop critiqued dominant structures and cultural narratives and offered new avenues for expressing diasporic experiences and creating alternate systems of power, leading to a fifth pillar of social and political consciousness and knowledge-building.

Together, objects in “The Culture” weave a compelling narrative about art and culture that is rarely experienced in a museum context—one that highlights a broad array of conceptual and material innovation.

“I have noticed connections to hip hop in the contemporary art world for years, and I think that the exhibitions that have interrogated these connections were compartmentalized. They typically did not give the same weight to fashion, material culture, or social history as they did to Contemporary art,” Naeem explained. “Baltimore is a significant locus within hip hop. The art, the fashion, and the club scene offer some incredible examples of the breadth of hip hop’s influence, and the BMA felt so well-poised to take on articulating the idea that domestic urban centers are connected through hip hop on a global stage.”

The contemporary artwork from international figures, as well as local artists working in Baltimore and St. Louis, is presented in dynamic dialogue with fashion and objects created and made famous by Lil’ Kim, Dapper Dan and Gucci, and Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, along with iconic brands like Cross Colours and TELFAR.

To the BMA’s credit, this material, uncommon for display alongside “fine” art, is treated with the respect, dignity, attention to detail, exhibition craft and reverence any marble bust of Julius Caesar dug out of the ground in Italy would be. The value judgement being made is one of equality.

“We know that not all visitors may have the same knowledge or appreciation of the importance of hip hop in contemporary culture, so we spent a lot of time ensuring that the exhibition interpretation really took audiences through our rationale,” Naeem said. “In building the checklist, we also noticed that many of the artworks loaned to the show were coming from private collections, galleries, or the artists themselves, rather than from other museums. This suggested less institutional support for collecting some of this material, which is an interesting commentary on what and who art museums are set up to value. I think that this show supports institutional change in this regard.”

Shouldn’t so-called “encyclopedic museums” like the BMA and SLAM–and The Met and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Dallas Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and 100 others nationwide–if they’re mission truly is to share the story of humanity’s greatest creative output over the last 5,000 years, pay attention to the most significant cultural force of the last half century? A cultural force showing no signs of slowing down.

Of course.

“Hip hop is one of those systems of knowledge that can account for changes in society—locally in Baltimore and St. Louis, and also across the world. It offers a framework for understanding Contemporary art and its connections to other aspects of cultural production that the traditional Western Art historical narrative does not,” Naeem said. “This exhibition continues the story of art history that encyclopedic museums like the BMA and SLAM are trying to tell, and it does it authentically.”

Crash Course

While hip hop devotes will find significant personal and communal resonance throughout “The Culture,” the show also provides an introduction into the explosive impact of the genre over the past two decades for those less versed.

The good news for anyone slow on the uptake of hip hop looking to dive in, many of the pioneering figures are still alive today. The music can be downloaded in an instant. The movies streamed. The styles still available for purchase.

When approaching any cultural movement, be that the Renaissance or hip hop, it’s often helpful to start with the highlights.

“You have a range from moments from when Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing’ was released in 1989 to Karl Lagerfeld’s fall 1991 runway show for Chanel,” Naeem listed as signature moments in hip hop. “The standard-setting videos Hype Williams directed for Missy Elliot’s ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ and TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ in the ‘90s strike me, as does the album ‘Watch the Throne’ in the last decade. More recently, The Carters video for ‘APESHIT’ and the fashions created by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton are defining moments.”

Moments being added to daily in, and by, “The Culture.”