Hip-hop comes alive at Smithsonian exhibit

Scripps Howard Foundation Wire

4:55 PM EDT, March 21, 2008

"LL Cool J" by Kehinde Wiley Oil on canvas, 2005, one of the works featured in a new Hip-Hop exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery. (Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery)

Hip-hop may not be what visitors to art museums expect to hear - or see.

Yet, the music and the visual art it inspires have come to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in an exhibit that combines portrait art with the influence of hip-hop, affirming that both are alive and vibrant.

Just down the hall from a permanent exhibit of portraits from America's beginnings, three curators have collaborated on a hip-hop-inspired display, "Recognize!" Brandon Fortune, the Portrait Gallery's curator of painting and sculpture; Frank Goodyear, assistant curator of photographs, and Jobyl A. Boone, a pre-doctoral fellow, have chosen a variety of mediums to explore the music's effect on visual art - including graffiti murals, paintings and photographs of performers, videos, a poem and the installation piece the poem inspired.

Goodyear said the news media have tried to move the genre to the margins of society because of the "very real" negative connotations of misogyny and violence.

"But there's nothing marginal about hip-hop at all. Hip-hop is at the center of our culture. It's the most influential cultural phenomenon that extends beyond the music," Goodyear said.

Curators said their goal was to make the exhibit uplifting and inclusive, rather than a historical sequence or critical examination of the culture.

The most famous hip-hop artists are portrayed in four paintings by Kehinde Wiley, part of a series that VH1 commissioned in 2005 for a Hip-Hop Honors program.

The paintings portray hip-hop icons in poses and the styles of classical portraits. Wiley painted LL Cool J in the style of a John Singer Sargent portrait of John D. Rockefeller, Big Daddy Kane in the classical pose of an earl and Ice T in the setting of a portrait of Napoleon. Although the poses resemble those in classic portraits, the performers' personas are modern.

"He takes away the context, and, by doing this, basically, Kehinde Wiley takes the black-man subject, who had only been on the margins of historical grand portraiture, and puts that man squarely in the center of tradition," Fortune said.

Goodyear said, "We consider this to be some of the finest work in the tradition of portraiture today. This is not a dead artistic genre, and here are some individuals who are recognizable to different audiences."

The exhibit will run through Oct. 26. For more information, seenpg.si.edu/exhibit/recognize.