Hip Hop’s Victory Lap Around the Art World Peaks in Baltimore

Hip hop is having a museum moment. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the genre’s birth in New York City, local institutions like the Museum at FIT, the Brooklyn Museum, and Fotografiska have all showcased how hip hop has shaped key parts of American culture as we know it today.

Where those shows offered a targeted analysis of the music and its creators’ influence on photography (Fotografiska) or carceral reform advocacy (the Brooklyn Museum), “Hip Hop and Contemporary Art” takes a wide-angle approach. The joint exhibition between the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum looks beyond fine art to fashion, technology, and music both internationally and in the U.S.

One of the show’s biggest strengths lies in its easy-to-follow examples of the genre’s seismic impact. Take a giant pair of Nike Air Force Ones created by Saint Louis artist Aaron Fowler. The exhibition creates a throughline between Fowler’s art, Nelly’s 2002 single “Air Force Ones,” and the pressure applied to Nike by Baltimore shoe stores to reissue the model after it was discontinued in 1984. Without hip hop’s cultural and economic sway, AF1s likely would have faded from memory altogether. It’s a bold curatorial narrative that doesn’t require an MFA to make sense of.

“Hip hop’s impact, meaning, and influence are both imperceivable and obvious, and are felt, in equal measure, across both mainstream culture and fine art,” says Asma Naeem, the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. “We’re developing a greater depth of scholarship about hip hop and how it appears as its own canon in so many aspects of art, allowing us to better understand the reasons why it has so deeply embedded itself in the global psyche.”

The show also has a number of gems for the crowd who knows their Telfar from their Wales Bonner and assiduously hunts for Virgil Abloh-era Louis Vuitton on The Real Real. Garments from each of these designers and Dapper Dan for Gucci, adidas Originals by Pharrell, and Baby Phat showcase hip hop’s grasp on fashion, breaking high-low boundaries.

Of course, the relationship between fine artists and hip hop is anything but an afterthought in a show that gives art the title focus. A dizzying catalog of works by both rising and established stars including Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Mehretu, Hank Willis Thomas, Derrick Adams, Hassan Hajjaj, and Lauren Halsey are among its biggest highlights. “Hip Hop and Contemporary Art” really shines in its refusal to assign hierarchy to hip hop’s sprawling influence, as if to say “It’s all part of the culture.”