Exhibition - The Culture: Hip Hop And Contemporary Art In The 21st Century

Wednesday, May 31, 2023 from 10:00am to 5:00pm
Baltimore Museum of Art
10 Art Museum Drive
443-573-1700

Since its emergence in the Bronx in the 1970s, hip hop has grown into a global phenomenon, driving innovations in music, fashion, technology, and visual and performing arts. 

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the birth of hip hop, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century captures the extraordinary influence hip hop has had on contemporary society through more than 90 works of art and fashion by some of today’s most important and celebrated artists and iconic brands including Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, Derrick Adams, Mark Bradford, Cross Colours, Dapper Dan and Gucci, Lauren Halsey, Julie Mehretu, Adam Pendleton, Tschabalala Self, TELFAR, Hank Willis Thomas, and Carrie Mae Weems. 

The Culture, co-organized with the Saint Louis Art Museum, explores the past two decades of hip hop through a wide range of painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video, and fashion organized into six themes—Language, Brand, Adornment, Tribute, Ascension, and Pose. 

“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 in the U.S. and abroad,” said Asma Naeem, the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director. “With this exhibition, we are developing a greater depth of scholarship about hip hop, and how it appears as its own canon in so many aspects of contemporary artmaking, allowing us to better understand its distinct qualities and the reasons why it has so deeply embedded itself in the global psyche.”

See the exhibition first during our Member Preview Days on Saturday, April 1 and Sunday, April 2

The Culture will be free for all visitors on April 16, May 21, and June 18.

Co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) and Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), the exhibition is co-curated by Asma Naeem, the BMA’s Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director; Gamynne Guillotte, the BMA’s Chief Education Officer; Hannah Klemm, SLAM’s Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; and Andréa Purnell, SLAM’s Audience Development Manager.

The Culture is further supported by an advisory committee comprising experts and artists across a wide range of disciplines, including Martha Diaz, Founder and President of the Hip-Hop Education Center; Wendel Patrick, professor at the Peabody Music Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University; Tef Poe, rapper and activist; Hélio Menezes, anthropologist and curator of Afro-Atlantic Histories; and Timothy Anne Burnside, public historian and Museum Specialist in Curatorial Affairs at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This exhibition is generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support is provided by The Alvin and Fanny B. Thalheimer Exhibition Endowment Fund.

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