Pages tagged “grandmaster flash”

Graffiti has long been considered one of the four fundamental elements of hip-hop culture, along with MCing, DJing and breakdancing. To ensure that this important visual component was properly represented in Recognize!, curators commissioned D.C. graffiti artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, whose work has been featured in advertisements and movies, to tag four 20-foot panels lining the hallway between the exhibition galleries.

During the summer preceding the opening, Conlon and Hupp tagged the panels with the exhibition's title, their own tags (CON and AREK), two stylized self-portraits, and lots of playing cards—in particular, the king of diamonds. "You have a master level of graffiti, a king," Conlon explains. "Graffiti is essentially a competition and a game of getting your name out there."

[View the Recognize! online exhibition here.]

Hip-hop, by nature, is autobiographical. MCs tend to identify themselves strongly—even existentially—with a particular place and time, detailing their often humble beginnings and remaining the primary subjects of their own songs. In this way, hip-hop is a form of continuous self-portraiture, and as such it’s the subject of Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture, a special exhibition running from Feb. 8 through Oct. 26 at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

“We’re not trying to say that this is a comprehensive show about hip-hop and its history,” says Brandon Fortune, a curator of painting and sculpture who co-organized the show with fellow curators Frank Goodyear and Jobyl Boone. “It’s hip-hop through the lens of portraiture, which is what we do.”

Recognize! is the first large-scale hip-hop installation to hang on Smithsonian walls, but the National Portrait Gallery is not alone in its attempt to bring this living, street-based artform into the confines of a museum. In 2006, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History launched a massive campaign to collect hip-hop memorabilia, which netted Grandmaster Flash’s turntables, Fab Five Freddy’s boom box, and a mixture of cheers and jeers from editorials and blogs. Exhibitions at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Brooklyn Museum have also displayed the genre’s artifacts, raising questions about what this new relationship between hip-hop and the museum world will mean for either party.

“You don’t want to turn hip-hop into a dead thing that’s going to be put into a glass case and taken out of its context,” says Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and editor of Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. “It’s participatory, it’s interactive, it’s engaging, it’s oftentimes infuriating, but it demands a response.”

THE MANY FACES OF HIP-HOP
Instead of displaying the music’s artifacts, as most shows have done, Recognize! takes a different approach: It exhibits visual responses to hip-hop. The exhibition features seven artists depicting a range of performers through a variety of media, devoting considerable attention to Santa Fe-based photographer David Scheinbaum and New York portraitist Kehinde Wiley. In his 26 black-and-white photographs, Scheinbaum—a former professor of photography at the College of Santa Fe, and once an assistant to renowned curator and author Beaumont Newhall—documents contemporary and, in some cases, lesser-known musicians such as Jean Grae, Cut Chemist, Mos Def and The Pharcyde, capturing most of them mid-performance. Masked rapper MF Doom is a blur of motion against a dark background; soul chanteuse Erykah Badu swings her arms in wild, theatrical swoops.

Wiley’s large-scale paintings, on the other hand, include portraits of established hip-hop icons: Ice-T, LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. These works are part of a series commissioned by VH-1 for its 2005 Hip-Hop Honors show. In contrast to Scheinbaum’s smaller, seemingly spontaneous monochrome images, Wiley’s canvases are enormous, colorful and knowingly composed. Wiley—drawing from European and American historical portraits—portrays his subjects as powerful and monumental: Ice-T sits in for J.A.D. Ingres’ Napoleon, clad in robes and seated on a throne, while LL adopts the pose and poise of John Singer Sargent’s John D. Rockefeller, implying an entrepreneurial link between the performer and the tycoon.

“I really loved the idea of allowing my work to somehow lionize the type of heroism surrounding the inception of hip-hop,” Wiley says. “It became an opportunity to allow the language and the power surrounding the history of painting to intermingle with a lot of the bravado surrounding the inception of hip-hop itself.”

Recognize! also includes an ode to hip-hop penned by poet Nikki Giovanni and inscribed on the gallery walls by Brooklyn sculptor Shinique Smith as part of an original installation. The show has a strong local component, too, with video installations by D.C. artist Jefferson Pinder and four 20-foot hallway panels painted by D.C. graffiti muralists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp (see sidebar)—all of which contain elements of self-portraiture.

MATTERS OF PERCEPTION
The National Portrait Gallery believes that Recognize! will encourage visitors to think about hip-hop in a broader cultural context. “I think the show brings to the forefront a number of important larger issues about race and class and popular culture that have of course circulated around hip-hop forever,” Goodyear says. As hip-hop enters the museum world, the effectiveness of exhibitions like Recognize! will depend heavily on whether viewers will participate in this type of critical questioning, or whether they will keep their distance, refusing to validate a subculture many believe is violent and misogynistic.

“The complexity of hip-hop is important to display,” Chang says. “The best art for me in hip-hop has been the art that’s completely challenged me and forced me to examine what I thought were pretty much sacred or fixed points of view. I would never want us to censor that or deny that particular impulse in art.”

“Hip-hop is as varied as those people who participate in the project itself,” Wiley explains. “There’s incredibly destructive hip-hop and there’s incredibly instructive hip-hop. I think the extent to which a museum is capable of depicting the whole arc of that is the extent to which the museum has a successful exhibition.”

With Recognize!, the National Portrait Gallery becomes the latest institution to argue for hip-hop’s relevance as a cultural form. According to Goodyear, “these images counter the notion that hip-hop is somehow destructive and bad. This is a beautiful, creative tradition that the youth culture of America understands, and we need to get behind that.”