♪ ♪ Artworks is made possible in part by... And by... GAMYNNE: As we think about what an American narrative is, and what American narrative can be, uh, there have been I think certain gatekeepers around that narrative over time and we think of, "An American History," or, "The American History," I think that what this show is proposing and what Hip Hops proposing is, "An American History," and that we're coming into a period of time where we're talking about American histories, plural, uh, and I think that that plurality of history is something that you see walking around this institution, walking through many of these galleries.

When you look at, no one of our galleries can really be, uh, bounded by geography because global trade, you know, both, uh, enforced and free has been moving throughout all of the objects that we have in this institution.

♪ ♪ VIRGINIA: Curating is a word that we're all using a lot these days, right?

I mean people talk about curating a playlist or curating a menu, and I think that really the historical root of the word has to do more with caring for something, so it's not just the selecting as we might think of it, but it's also the ongoing care for works.

ASMA: Curation and being a curator basically involves two things, number one you're taking care of objects you're a steward of objects, you're ensuring the safety of the object, you're ensuring that the object isn't decaying or, um, falling into disrepair.

VIRGINIA: We have some sculptural works on view and we have to be really mindful that we install them in a way that hopefully they won't get touched by our visitors or viewers, that's why you'll often see works under a vitrine, under a glass case.

Other times we have works on paper so in this presentation we have two works by the photographer James Van Der Zee and those are light sensitive, so works on paper can typically only be up for like six months.

And then we have to take them off view and we'll put up something else in its place.

ASMA: You're also studying the object, you're talking about the origins of the object, who made it, how did they make it, why did they make it?

You're recording all of that information, you're talking to the folks who bought the object or who brought it to the museum to keep that record of how it's been passed through generations.

And then you're also writing about the object, studying the object and then placing it on the walls of the museum to make sure the visitors can understand and appreciate the history of the object.

GAMYNNE: I'll answer this in two ways because I think that there's a distinction that's important to be made between curatorial work and curatorial practice and exhibition making.

So what I think that I've done through many, many different phases of my career is exhibition-making work, so work that's really about selecting artwork, selecting artists, determining a theme for an exhibition, determining its layout, thinking about how visitors will interact with it, that's exhibition making, it's one very, very important part of what curators do, but it's not all of what curators do, it's just what the public sees.

But a lot of what curators do is really about taking care of the art and being stewards of the art, bringing artwork into the collection of an institution, deaccessioning artwork from a collection of an institution.

That is not the work that I do, uh, I am very much an exhibition maker, so that is what curators do, uh, in collecting institutions.

You know, and the extent to which it is an art form, you know, I think that what good curatorial work does is it helps to produce knowledge it creates new ways of knowing and new ways of seeing through different kinds of juxtapositions of objects that you might, that you might never think of being together.

Uh, a good example in this exhibition is that we have a lot of, you know, painting and photography right next to things that you might be more familiar with in a, a cultural museum or a history museum.

Uh, like fashion and photography, documentary photography.

And so when you get these interesting juxtapositions you get different conversations, uh, about how we understand the kind of a knowledge base to be and so that's really the, the creative work I think of, of doing curatorial work.

VIRGINIA: When we think about conventional exhibitions, you might often think about like a solo exhibition that's focused on an artist's work, so maybe it's a new young artist, maybe it's, um, a career retrospective for an older artist, um, or an, a historical artist, right?

Um, additionally you might see a thematic exhibition, so it's a presentation on a particular subject and it's often bounded by a time period, like, "Oh, nineteenth century something, something," or, um, a geographical region, so you might see a show on, "American Landscape Painting of the Nineteenth Century," or something like that.

Um, when we think about more innovative approaches we might think about, um, introducing, uh, maybe it's a new subject, so again it could be a young artist whose work you haven't heard of yet, or it could be a new interpretation of an artist whose name is well-known, it could also be a brand-new subject, so our upcoming Hip Hop show is a perfect example of that.

So this collection installation, um, is organized thematically, so, you know, as you think about narratives, um, we have a group of works that have to do with the metropolis, we're thinking about the city because this is, uh, a presentation that's focused on American works from between 1900 and 1950.

And if you think sort of historically and culturally about that time, right, there's so much urbanization that's happening, um, there's the great migration that's happening from the south to the north, there is, uh, war and displacement of people, and there's a rise in labor and manufacturing.

So what we've done in this room is we've grouped together certain objects to try to tell those stories so that if you're seeing a group of works that's organized around a theme like the city, you could, should be able to look at them and think about, "What does it mean to be living in a city?"

Hip Hop comes out of an urban culture and, you know, the intensity of urban life, I think also, um, Hip Hop is a, is an innovation, right?

It's, um, experimental, it's innovative, um, and we have a section as well in this installation that really is about artists experimenting and that can be done either through new materials and how they're working with new materials for the first time, um.

It can also be again how they're reinterpreting subjects which again is standard practice I think in a lot of Hip Hop culture as it's evolved over the 50 years, right?

You take something old and you make something brand-new with it and we see artists in here who are doing exactly the same thing.

ASMA: What I saw when I was a curator at the National Portrait Gallery was that contemporary art and Hip Hop were constantly intertwined.

There were moments where contemporary artists were referencing Hip Hop songs, there were moments when Hip Hop artists were being portrayed in artworks and it suddenly hit me that this relationship between Hip Hop and contemporary art was more than just graffiti and that it needed a longer look and a more expansive look.

And as I started to work through the idea and started talking to my colleagues and started reading about what other folks had done on Hip Hop shows, it became apparent that there was two different approaches to Hip Hop, um, in the museum world.

One was to look at it just from like the history point of view, you know, start with the, with Kool Herc and his sister Cindy in the 1970s Bronx Block Party and move through kind of like the record of that movement in terms of photographs and less from an artistic point of view but more from a material, culture, historical point of view.

That was one approach that museums were taking.

Another approach was to talk about contemporary art and Hip Hop, but mostly through the idea of graffiti, because that's how most people, when you say Hip Hop and contemporary art, that's what most people think of.

And so for, for all of us as we began to think about this idea we saw that we needed to build in all of the other kinds of ways of making and celebrating Hip Hop that were occurring with the young creatives and even the, the older artists, and so what we realized was that this wasn't just going to be a show about graffiti, it was not just going to be a show about the history, it was gonna be a show about the history, the graffiti, it was gonna be a show about the wigs, it was gonna be a show about the fashion, it was gonna be a show about the music, it was gonna be a show about the shoes, but it was also gonna be a show about the beautiful, beautiful sculptures and paintings and installations that so many people look at on a daily basis and maybe recognize it has some kind of Hip Hop in it but don't really understand.

DAYTON: I'm philosophically an Afrofuturist and although this wasn't an Afrofuturist exhibition, the sensibilities that I have as, as someone who's trying to reconcile with, you know, historical erasure and, and memory loss as a Black American.

And trying to use design as a mechanism and a tool to, to raise awareness, create new forums, and new avenues of, of creativity became sort of the, a thematic driver or, or sort of a, a mood-setting device within the context of this space.

I think it's important in, in hindsight of the 50-year birth anniversary of Hip Hop to understand that, that Hip Hop had its humble roots, um, in the outset of the, the Civil Rights Movement, you know, the, the... Hip Hop literally was born less than ten years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

And so, in, in some ways, you know, if, if, if the Civil Rights Act was the seed, you know, Hip Hop is really the, the fruit that we see coming out of the 1970s as kind of a, a testament to the promise of, of, you know, freedom and integration in this country.

♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Hey ♪♪ DAYTON: Design for me, it's really about, uh, the reconciling the function of a space, um, with the art, you know?

Design at its highest level also has the power to, to really make us whole.

And so, I see, I see design in its highest form as an, as an art form, in and of itself.

You know, the black walls, for example, was really intended to really give a sense of mystery and really space setting between the, the art pieces themselves.

We basically look for a lot of, um, inspiration in the kind of foundational elements of Hip Hop.

You know, when you look at the early Park Jams, you see that, you see the huge speaker arrays, really embody the sound.

And so, we, we took inspiration from those, those speaker wall arrays to create these, these interludes, these moments throughout the, the installation.

It's kind of like a concept album.

I think one of the biggest challenges for me, theoretically on this project, was how to kind of reconcile the contradiction of, of bringing Hip Hop, you know, which is a, a living, um, cultural entity into a, into a static space, like a gallery where it's objectified, right?

In fact, Hip Hop historically wouldn't have been welcomed into a space like this.

These are one of the institutions that would have rejected Hip Hop at its outset.

And so, just theoretically knowing and reconciling with the best ways to present, you know, this rich embodiment of Hip Hop culture manifested through, you know, sculpture, art, printed works, fashion, film, music, video, and, and trying to, trying to put that in a format.

In essence was disruptive to the kind of typical mode of, of exhibits and galleries.

But, but at the same time, building on the, on the rich tradition of art, museums, and art history, and providing something new.

ASMA: The Culture, is the title of the exhibition.

It's Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.

And The Culture, we wanted to pick that, we, we used that phrase for several reasons.

I think one of the most important, from my point of view, was talking about how Hip Hop culture is an entire world view, it's an entire culture, it's a way of life.

And, um, you know, there's a lot of Rap music that talks about the culture, um.

You know, including, uh, Kendrick Lamar's latest album.

But for, for us, it was also about the museum culture, the culture of the world of art making, and how culture is considered to be a really important way to show intelligence and refinement.

So, it's a play on that, um, word in, in many different ways.

GAMYNNE: So, we have six themes, uh, in the exhibition, uh.

As you move through the exhibition, you will experience; Language, and then into Brand, uh, Adornment, Tribute, uh, Ascension, and Pose.

ASMA: Though the first big theme that you'll be seeing is Language, and we wanted to talk about the ways in which language is not just the written and spoken word.

But it's also looking at the visual language of graffiti, it's also looking at the musical language, the ways in which sampling occurs, and scratching records occurs.

And it's also looking at the language of how one, um, telegraphs to the world, uh, the ways in which Hip Hop can be seen on the streets.

GAMYNNE: And next you'll encounter, uh, the section on Brand.

And, of course, thinking about Brand is really, really exciting.

When you think about those intersections that happen between the world of fine art, high fashion, you know, and, and, and the world of Hip Hop.

And so, one object that we have been really excited to be talking about, uh, is Pharrell's very iconic Buffalo Hat that everyone knows and loves so very well.

Pharrell bought the hat, uh, in a, in a shop and loved the hat, decided that it would be a really good iconic look for him.

So, he went looking for who was the original designer of the hat.

The hat was originally designed by a designer by the name of Vivienne Westwood, who just passed away recently actually.

And Vivienne Westwood, uh, is also remembered as the partner of Malcolm McLaren.

Malcolm McLaren, of course, is a very important music impresario.

He put together bands like The Sex Pistols.

He, uh, toured The Ramones in Europe, uh, and, you know, he was very, very interested in Punk Rock and he's known for his association with Punk Rock.

However, end of the '70s, beginning of the early '80s, McLaren starts to get interested in other kinds of youth movements because he follows youth movements.

So, he, he sees Rap beginning to become a thing and he says, "I gotta get, I gotta jump on this bandwagon next."

So, he puts together a group, uh, in England called The World's Famous Supreme Team, as a Rap act, uh, and starts touring them around.

He dresses them in the, uh, Buffalo Hat designed by his then partner, uh, Vivienne Westwood, uh.

They produced an album called Duck Rock.

Keith Haring, of all people, did the, did the, uh, the, uh, album art, uh, for the inside of the album and the outside of the album, uh.

And, uh, they have a, uh, a hit off of it, uh, by the name of Buffalo Girls, a song that many of us, uh, remember fondly from back in the day.

So, what I find really interesting about this sort of, this, this chain of coincidence that leads Pharrell to randomly see this hat, that had already been part of an iconic kind of history, uh, early history of, of Rap, you know, is, is really interesting to me.

In terms of what it says about how people, you know, become personal brands, take on certain objects and identities as a personal brand.

Very interesting story.

ASMA: And from Brand, we go into Adornment.

You cannot talk about Hip Hop and contemporary art without talking about bling.

And so, Adornment is looking at the ways in which Hip Hop culture explores different ways to adorn oneself.

We of course have the bling, the jewelry, the chains, the diamond, um, stud earrings.

But we also have things like grills, we also have the incredible beauty of nails and the artistry of wigs.

WOMAN: Amazing.

DIONNE: Amazing.

WOMAN: It's beautiful.

DIONNE: Dionne Alexander.

Where is my name?

Let's see.

Here it is!

(laughter).

DIONNE: Born in 1967.

(screams).

They got my age up there.

These went from, um, these went from '99 to about 2002.

Very, I'm very honored.

I never would have thought.

20 years later.

WOMAN: And there's the two pictures there!

DIONNE: They weren't there.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

I totally grew up, I totally grew up when Hip Hop... MAN: Yeah.

DIONNE: Was not supposed to be anymore.

They said it was gonna last, it wasn't gonna last, you know what I mean?

And look, look, 50 years later, Hip Hop?

And it's a part of every culture now, you know what I mean?

MAN: Mm-hmm.

DIONNE: It's amazing.

ASMA: One thing that I am just blown away about, um, from, in the Adornment section of the exhibition, is this breathtakingly all-black canvas made entirely of durags.

And when you walk up to it...

It's by Anthony Akinbola.

When you walk up to it, from afar it looks like it's various brush strokes, but then as you get closer you see that he stretched the durags into all these beautiful directions.

It's just mesmerizing.

MURJONI: First of all, Hip Hop to me is expression, it's a lot about expression in different forms of art.

So, that could be music, that could be style, that could be hairstyles.

And for Zella, I really wanted to incorporate the idea of self-love and Blackness, and being proud in Hip Hop, um.

So, when I made Zella, I actually made Zella for this show and she was made, she's made with ceramic, and then I hand braided synthetic hair, adhered it to the sculpture, and then I styled the hair.

And I wanted to incorporate adornments like the, the bamboo earrings, or the eyelashes, or like the, the hair we, itself we get from the beauty supply store.

The hair itself is ombré, so it starts to black and then it goes to green.

But the ends of the hair, as you can see the ends are kind of forming in the eye sockets.

The ends of the hair are burnt and that's kind of reminiscent on, you know, when I was a child and I got my hair done, when I had hair, um, my mom would do my hair with braids and then she would burn the edges to keep them intact.

There's other ways to do that but, I feel like a lot of Black women also go through those stages as well.

So, even like the, the tips of the ends of her hair are burnt as well.

ASMA: And then from Adornment, we get to Tribute.

Tribute, there are so many folks in the contemporary art world who are making art honoring the legends in Hip Hop.

So, we had to have a section about that.

So, you'll see in that section images of, um, famous, famous singers and performers, like Tupac and Biggie.

But we also explore in the fashion world how folks are paying tribute.

So, we're really honored to be having one of the final collections that, uh, Virgil Abloh made, um, as the lead designer for the Parisian Couture House Louis Vuitton.

We're really honored to have a tracksuit from that collection.

And so, what we're saying is that when you look at this tracksuit, that's, you know, covered in this beautiful, fine, very silky fabric that's got the Louis Vuitton monogram and this incredible gold belt, he's actually paying homage to the tracksuit, he's paying tribute to the tracksuit that folks like Run-DMC originated back in the day.

And so, you see those kinds of legacies being revived.

GAMYNNE: And as you pass through Tribute, you will come into a section where the tone of the, the show changes really pretty radically, uh.

And this is, uh, a section that we're calling Ascension.

Something that we found that, really just coming out of the check-list itself is that the way that many artists, both in the world of Hip Hop and in the world of contemporary art, were thinking about sort of Hip Hop and, and spirituality, thinking about death and transcendence, uh, thinking about legacy, uh, was really incredibly powerful.

And so, we, we shift tone there to, you know, some very beautiful, very fine, very contemporative works, uh, for, in almost a chapel-like environment in those galleries.

And as you exited, uh, the Ascension galleries, we end the show on a high in Pose.

Really thinking about the way that Hip Hop is, is elaborated through gesture, and through stance, and through positioning, uh, and through sort of how the body moves.

ERNEST: So, my name is Ernest Shaw and the title of my piece is, I Had A Dream I Could Buy My Way To Heaven.

Portrait of Ota Benga.

This piece came to me while I was at a residency in, uh, middle Virginia, ten minutes away from where Ota Benga allegedly took his life.

And, uh, some would ask, "What does that have to do with Hip Hop?"

Uh, in actuality, Ota Benga was exhibited in The World's Fair, uh, with, with, other people of the Congo in the early 20th century.

Hip Hop, um, in the early 21st century, it could be said, uh, from a cultural perspective, is very much an exhibition internationally.

So, there's that tie between Ota Benga and what was going on with The World's Fair in the early 20th century and Hip Hop culture in the early 21st century.

So, Ota Benga was first exhibited at The World's Fair in St. Louis on the very grounds where the St. Louis Museum actually resides right now.

And both, the BMA and the St. Louis Museum are co-curating the show.

He eventually made his way, um, against his will, to the Bronx, where it's said that the Bronx is where Hip Hop began.

They say the Bronx gave birth to Hip Hop.

But in the early 20th century, he was exhibited in the Bronx Zoo, um, before he was freed by I believe some, some members of the clergy.

Curation and curators are very important when we talk about the art world and they're very important considering their relationship to artists.

Artists create work, curators curate and bring together different works and different artists to work sort of educationally, or at least to inform the public.

So, curators, in my opinion, are somewhat artists themselves, uh.

They take a topic or they take some subject matter and they bring different artists and different artwork together to have an impact on society.

MURJONI: BMA's been a great place to work with.

I mean, as far as staff, as far as like their dedication and why I make the work that I make, they want to know these things.

And I'm glad that they want to know that because some, some places just kind of wanna place your stuff into places and not really, not really understand why you do what you do.

Artwork for a lot of artists is a lot more personal than people think it is.

It's a, it's more of pieces of ourselves.

So, when we give our work to a curator, we're trusting you with our, parts of ourselves.

CHARLES: So, just a little bit about my practice.

I graduated, uh, in 2019 from grad school and I made it an, an important effort to change my relationship with my father.

Our relationship was kind of strained, you know, like whether it was growing pains or just figuring out what it meant to be a man, a Black person, and all these different things.

And so, I wanted to get to know him and figure out who he was because all the stories I heard about him were from other people.

And so, I started to think about this relationship I have with my father.

So, I'm named after him, of course, I'm the third, my father's a junior, and my grandfather is a senior.

And so, for me, I have to unpack that.

I have to really think about who these people were, and who I want to be, and how I want to break those generational curses.

And so, when I'm thinking about my work, I'm thinking about conditional love and enduring it, and what were the conditions for my father to exist, to be, and how he endured that.

And then I started thinking about my work as what are the conditions for people to love the Black body?

And then I started thinking about my work as far as what are the conditions for me to love myself.

And so, when I think about Hip Hop, I think about what it means to scream, I think about what it means to talk, I think about what it means to want to be heard.

Whether you're angry, you're happy, you're joyous, because we're all kind of seeking some form of attention.

But really it's like, we just want to be seen as a person.

Hip Hop to me, is the greatest example of collage and we know, we understand collage as having like magazines, or newspapers, or photographs that are cut up to create something new, um.

That's what Hip Hop is, it's samples, it's sounds, it's drums, it's, uh, people mouths, like being collaged together to create something new, to really add something new.

And so, when I look at this show, I'm looking at the many ways that Black and Brown people are being able to tell a similar story; an understanding of self, of identity, a understanding of what it means to move through space, to listen to music, to be influenced by music, and to be a part of a genre that is literally the most streaming genre in the world, but it's only 50 years old, um.

You know, some of these things don't really make sense but it does make sense when you think about Black people you think about Brown people when you think about the impact of Hip Hop.

So, I think the show does what the show is supposed to do.

It's supposed to talk about the culture and its many facets, and its many ways of existing.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Artworks is made possible in part by... And by...