Recognize!, the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibit about hip-hop culture, is slightly self-admonishing, born of a desire to recognize the movement’s work as “museum-worthy.”
Doing a bit of sampling of its own, the Portrait Gallery chose a photographer, a painter, a poet, a video artist and two graffiti artists to showcase different aspects of hip-hop. Forgoing its usual strategy of sticking to retrospectives, the Smithsonian museum has produced an awkward first foray into current culture. Although the exhibit feels disjointed and insufficient at times, most of its pieces are unique and worth seeing.
The problem with Recognize! first becomes apparent at the gallery’s entrance, where a series of graffiti panels created specifically for the exhibition by local artists Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp line the walls. The artists describe their art as “pay[ing] homage to the styles and kings who came before us,” and the panels depict striking lettering and the artists’ tags, “CON” and “AREK” in bold colors, over a background illustration of a subway car. The artists reference styles of earlier graffiti artists whose work resides in museum-unfriendly places like the sides of buildings or train cars, but true street graffiti is noticeably absent from the exhibition. A more informative and complete show could have given context with photographs of the actual open-air graffiti that influenced these artists, but Recognize! only takes the time and space for a reproduction, rather than the real thing.
Fortunately, the exhibit’s portaits are a more coherent celebration of hip-hop culture. David Scheinbaum’s black-and-white concert photographs capture moments of connection between audiences and performers like ?uestlove from the Roots and Pharrell Williams of N.E.R.D. The focus on music performance compliments the larger-than-life portraits by Kehinde Wiley, which put pioneering hip-hop artists in recognizable scenes from Western art over the past few centuries, such as a portrait of Ice-T seated in exactly the same position as Ingres’ portrait of Napoleon. As one of the more provocative parts of the exhibition, Wiley’s portraits are open to many interpretations; the young and quickly rising artist hints that one of his themes is “history as it relates to bling-bling” as he traces humanity’s love of ornamentation from gilded French patterns to jewelry today.
Recognize! also includes a video self-portrait by Jefferson Pinder and a mixed-media installation by Shinique Smith that responds to a poem by Nikki Giovanni. The Portrait Gallery invited the activist, author and Grammy-nominated poet—who has written about hip-hop since it began in the late 1970s and earned shoutouts from Dibable Planets, Nas and Kanye West—to create a poem specifically for Recognize! Those outside the hip-hop or poetry sphere may know her as the last speaker at the Virginia Tech memorial service, where she roused the somber crowd to their feet with the line that came to symbolize VT’s mourning: “we are Virginia Tech, we will prevail.” There’s a reason Giovanni was saved for the end of the ceremony—she crafts inspiring spoken-word pieces that embody a community’s spirit. Printed on a wall in its own gallery and accompanied by a voice recording by Giovanni herself, “It’s Not a Just Situation: Though We Just Can’t Keep Crying About It (For the Hip Hop Nation That Brings Us Such Exciting Art)” fills the last room of the exhibit, using poetry to create a fuller snapshot of hip-hop culture.
Recognize! chooses mostly worthy pieces to introduce Smithsonian-museum-goers to the vast branches of the hip-hop movement; its shortcomings are its lack of depth and authenticity. While the exhibition’s literature addresses hip-hop’s fight to be seen as a “legitimate and vibrant form” of cultural expression, it ironically ignores real street graffiti created by anonymous artists in favor of pieces designed for the museum. Hopefully Recognize! will be a starting point for future explorations of hip-hop culture that delve deeper into the movement.
Recognize! is on view until October 28 at The National Portrait Gallery at Eighth and F Streets, across the street from the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station. It is open from 11:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily. Admission is free.
