Sebastian Smee
BALTIMORE (THE WASHINGTON POST) – A charged, discordant energy runs through The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA).
The show, mounted in what is ostensibly a citadel of European culture (replete with neoclassical facade) in a majority-Black city, takes on the visual culture of hip-hop, one of the most ubiquitous cultural phenomena of the past half-century. You can see the potential for friction.
Hip-hop is the most streamed genre of music in the world. Its influence is pervasive not only in music, where it long ago spilled over into other genres, but also in fashion, advertising and everyday speech.
The exhibition, a collaboration between the BMA and the Saint Louis Art Museum, where it will travel next, is fabulous. Critical where it could have been hagiographical, concise where it might have been muddled, and generous when it might have been exclusive, it is full of terrific art.
Subtly and suggestively hung, it also shimmers with an unexpected fragility, disorienting the viewer with compounding evidence not only of creative brilliance but also of a careening pathos.
Pathos, by which I mean here a kind of collapse into poignant sadness, is often the most apt response to excruciating, unsustainable contradictions. It infuses the music of such stars as Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, and Mac Miller, so it’s no surprise that expressions of it are scattered throughout this show.
But there are just as many moments of buoyancy. Before entering, you encounter a giant pair of Nike Air Force One sneakers made from old car parts by St Louis artist Aaron Fowler.
You can imagine their scale when I tell you the laces, which are in proportion to the shoes, are seat belts.
The two shoes neatly link the cities hosting the show. It was Saint Louis hip-hop artist Nelly who kicked off the 21st-Century craze for the Air Force style when he released his 2002 single Air Force Ones, and it was Baltimore sneaker retailers who helped persuade Nike to resurrect the shoe after it was discontinued.
Inside the show, you can’t not delight in the presence of the oversized felt “buffalo hat” designed by Vivienne Westwood and worn by Pharrell Williams to the 2014 Grammys.
The sandwich chain Arby’s has lent the hat, having purchased it for USD44,100 on e-Bay after a lighthearted social media exchange with Williams in the wake of the Grammys.
One of the show’s low-key highlights is the cover sleeve for Beat Bop designed in 1983 by Rammellzee and K-Rob with Jean-Michel Basquiat. You can also see a mannequin dressed in the red overalls (designed by Sheila Rashid) and the “New Era Three” cap worn by Chance the Rapper at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards.
But all these feel like homages to hip-hop, the equivalent of relics, rather than living evidence of the influence of hip-hop on recent art. So what is the connection?
A Gordon Parks photograph opens a sliding door onto that very question. Called A Great Day in Hip Hop, the 1998 image, which Parks, then at the height of his fame, had to be cajoled into taking, is a group portrait of 177 people (almost entirely men) associated with hip-hop.
Commissioned by the rap magazine XXL, the photograph deliberately restaged A Great Day in Harlem, a 1958 photograph by Art Kane, which brought together 57 luminaries of jazz, including Thelonious Monk, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins and Art Blakey. Among the royalty of rap gathered in Harlem 40 years later were Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Fab 5 Freddy, and members of the Wu-Tang Clan.
So the Parks photograph was an homage, charged with rivalry, to that earlier art form and a response to the idea that hip-hop was not only “the new jazz”, as the critic Harry Allen had written, but had supplanted jazz as the soundtrack of creative rebellion. Modern art was profoundly affected by jazz. You can see its influence not only on American artists such as Romare Bearden and Bob Thompson but also on Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian. Has hip-hop had a comparable impact on art?
This show argues yes. But it’s complicated. Both forms emerged from African American tradition and lived experience. But where jazz leans abstract (it’s most easily talked about in terms of formal innovations like swing, syncopation, improvisation and modal chords), hip-hop is jammed with content. Because its elements are more tangled, its meanings more distributed, its impact on visual culture is correspondingly complex.
What are those elements? The BMA’s director and one of the show’s four curators Asma Naeem (the others are the BMA’s Gamynne Guillotte and Hannah Klemm and Andréa Purnell from the Saint Louis Art Museum), identifies four: language, both spoken (the flow of rap or MCing) and written (graffiti). Beats, encompassing DJing, sampling, turntabling and technology.
Adornment and personal style, in the forms of fashion, hair designs, bling, grills (dental jewellery) and sneakers.
And performance, in the forms of break dancing (or b-boying), hand gestures and all the other physical expressions that are part and parcel of hip-hop culture.
The art in The Culture connects to all four of these elements, rather than to a single stylistic idiom like sampling. That helps explain why there’s so little unifying the show visually.
One of the finest works is a four-panel abstraction by Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola. Combining the compositional dynamism of Lee Krasner with the dark gravitas of Louise Nevelson, Akinbola has stretched, cut and sewn together dozens of durags (stretchy hair protectors) to create a dynamic, shimmering composition where matte alternates with glossy and pleated diagonals consort with smooth and bulging forms. It’s ravishing.
As with a nearby Mark Bradford work made from hairdressers’ endpapers and named “Biggie, Biggie, Biggie” (the chorus of the single Hypnotize by the Notorious BIG, you could argue that the piece’s formal rhythms evoke the flow-on rhymes and sprung rhythms of rap – and they do. But the more salient connection, in both cases, is their connection with Black hair culture, itself freighted with social, political and personal meanings.
Another great example of the complexity of hip-hop’s influence on art is Nina Chanel Abney’s collage Expensive Pain, based on the cover art she designed for rapper Meek Mill’s 2021 album. The work, which is inspired by Matisse’s Jazz cutouts, sparked a debate about whether it celebrated or parodied the hypersexualised, often misogynistic side of hip-hop culture.
While you’re trying to decide, consider the artist Rozeal’s painting riffing on the Japanese subculture known as Ganguro (Japanese for “face-black”).
Ganguro, which emerged among Japanese hip-hop fans in the mid-1990s, saw them adopting Black hairstyles and darkening their skin with self-tanner – an almost comically lurid twist in the double helix of identity politics, where appropriation and self-expression can no longer be separated.
Almost everything about hip-hop is inflected by the politics of race, urban inequity and gender, and perhaps the culture’s most discombobulating aspect: its embrace of capitalist excess in the forms of branding, conspicuous consumption, celebrity, stunting and swagger.
This is where the show’s mood of pathos comes in. It’s there in a small portrait by Ernest Shaw, titled I Had a Dream I could Buy My Way to Heaven (Portrait of Ota Benga).
And it’s there in Larry Cook’s short video Picture Me Rollin which shows a black Lamborghini spinning in circles to a soundtrack by the rap group Big Tymers, with part of the audio replaced with Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech.
“The materialism glorified in hip-hop music,” the wall label quotes Cook saying, “has become the American Dream for many”. He’s not too happy about that, I’m guessing.
Pathos infuses two of the best-known and most brilliant works in the show, both videos. One, by Kahlil Joseph, is a 15-minute, two-channel video set to songs from Kendrick Lamar’s 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city. It’s a poetic, moving portrait of Compton, California.
The second is an eight-minute video, 4:44 made to accompany Jay-Z’s track of the same name. An extended apology for infidelity to his wife, Beyoncé, the video was made by film studio TNEG (Arthur Jafa, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Malik Sayeed) and is filled with sadness and shame. It’s also incredibly beautiful.
Somewhere near the heart of hip-hop is the complicated pathos of bragging when you don’t actually have power, and the linked pathos of an economically disadvantaged subculture defining success for itself in nakedly consumerist terms. (I’m not talking about the handful of hip-hop artists who have unimaginable wealth; I’m talking about everyone else).
Of course, these and other apparently contradictory manifestations of hip-hop culture can be seen as strategic responses to powerlessness, and they take exuberant, savvy, subtle and self-aware forms.
You only have to listen to the best hip-hop or watch the accompanying videos to grasp how incredibly sophisticated, poetic, audacious and complex it is.
But the image that haunts me from this show is a simple painting by the portraitist Jordan Casteel, called Fendi. Modest in scale, it shows an unidentified passenger in a subway car wearing camouflage pants and clutching bags covered in Fendi logos.
The wall label explains: “Through conspicuously branded luxury items, a person aligns themselves with the lifestyle and affluence the brand represents. Sometimes, this image of wealth is at odds with reality.”
That word “sometimes” is about as saturated in pathos as it’s possible to get.
