Co-curator Andrea Purnell said the four-member team engaged in extensive outreach and collaboration.
“It was important for us to be as genuine as possible, thinking about the grassroots of hip-hop,” said the St. Louis Art Museum Audience Development Manager. “Because of that, we talked to as many people as we could. We formed a global advisory group that comprised fashion designers, people in hip-hop and other curators. We are building off their story of hip-hop. This is not the first hip-hop exhibition. We talked to the others to tell us how it happened, what went well and what didn’t.
“Once we got in a room and said this is our idea, then we decided – even with the checklist – to make sure we spoke to as many of the artists as we could to tell us how this work is hip-hop what hip-hop means to them. Some of the artists said ‘I know you are looking at this work and I know you are interested in the show, but actually I have grown up a bit and hip-hop has influenced my practice in this way and I want to make something new for you’. They got so excited. We had so many artists make brand-new work when they heard about the premise of the show that we thought we might be on to something.”
Organized by the St. Louis and Baltimore Art Museums, the exhibition highlights the art form’s ongoing conceptual and material innovation.
Placing fashion, consumer marketing, music, videos and objects in dialogue with paintings, sculpture, poetry, photography and multi-media installations, it considers activism and racial identity, notions of blind swagger as well as gender, sexuality and feminism.
“This multidisciplinary exhibition probably tells you most that hip-hop can’t be boxed in,” said Purnell who is also an Actor, Writer, Director and Stage Manager with the Groundlings Theatre in Los Angeles. “There is no one way to get to hip-hop. It has truly influenced contemporary art which is what the show is all about. The ways in which that comes to life in the wigs that Lil Kim wore along with the grills and gold chains. All of this is paying homage to this limitless art form.”
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