How Hip Hop changed the face of art: a new Baltimore show explores the story

Fifty years ago, Hip Hop was born in an apartment building in The Bronx, New York, where a man named Clive Campbell was throwing a back-to-school party among artists, poets, musicians and dancers. 

Standing behind the DJ deck, he drops the era's classics: James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and The Meters. But there’s a twist: Campbell plays two copies of the same record across two turntables, a technique known as the merry-go-round. A looped counterpoint is created between the records, creating a heavily percussive, high-octane, dance-inducing sound. This music, which emerged as music from Black, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx Americans and rapidly proliferated via large-scale block parties, would change the face of music, arts and culture forever. 

Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century

Half a century since Hip Hop was conceived, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has now unveiled a major exhibition that dives into the conceptual, cultural, and artistic characteristics that have made hip hop an enduring global phenomenon and embedded it in the canon of art history. 

‘The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century’ features more than 90 works of art by some of today’s most important visual and cross-disciplinary artists, including Derrick Adams, Mark Bradford, Lauren Halsey, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Tschabalala Self, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems, as well as several creatives with links to Baltimore and St Louis, such as Devin Allen, Monica Ikegwu, Amani Lewis, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Damon Davis, and Jen Everett. The exhibition experience is enhanced by a pulsing soundscape composed by Baltimore-based musicians Abdu Ali and Wendel Patrick, plus several outdoor works including a large-scale ode to Nike Air Force 1 sneakers.

The artwork is staged in dialogue with fashion and objects created and made iconic by the likes of Lil’ Kim, Dapper Dan and Gucci, and Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, along with brands like Cross Colours and Telfar. ‘The Culture’ tells the story of this fertile movement through painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video, and installations organised under six themes: Language, Brand, Adornment, Tribute, Ascension, and Pose.

‘Hip hop’s influence is so significant that it has become the new canon – an alternate set of ideals of artistic beauty and excellence centred around the Afro-Latinx identities and histories – and one that rivals the Western art historical canon around which many museums orient and develop exhibitions,’ explained Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis director. ‘Many of the most compelling visual artists working today are directly engaging with central tenets of this canon in their practices, in both imperceivable and manifest ways. 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 show captures the pan-disciplinary phenomenon of hip hop; its ability to traverse high and low culture, and how it preempted a contemporary landscape in which creative fields continue to blur and overlap. 

‘The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century’  is co-organised by the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it is on view until 16 July 2023, and the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) where it will move from 25 August 2023 - 1 January 2024. artbma.org