Up with hip-hop: born on the streets, hip-hop art is here, happening and ready for its close-up

Art Business News, Jan, 2004 by John Swenson

On an early winter afternoon in New Orleans' Garden District, flowers are still blooming and the sun casts a subtropical warmth on shoppers perusing the ancient storefront galleries that make up the area known as Magazine Row.

Most of the shops and galleries offer a hodgepodge of traditional New Orleans colonial art and antiques--from baroque and rococo works to oil portraits and Victorian furniture. But the most bustling of the galleries is a sun-washed, two story lavender Spanish colonial building with a latticed metal balcony porch. A cartoon bubble sign in canary yellow announces the Lionel Milton Gallery.

Cartoon faces adorn the gallery's facade: a black man with a huge afro and goatee floats over a popeyed 'toon kid, his mouth an astonished oval under his red cap. And a grinning crescent moon smiles above a sexy red fire hydrant fashioned as a woman's face.

Inside, Milton sells an array of original works, prints, posters, T-shirts and fashion wear all reflecting the hip-hop style of his "elleone" calling card, the same tag he used when he started out as a struggling graffiti artist decorating the streets of the ghetto neighborhood in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, where he grew up.

Milton, 30, is one of the hottest artists in New Orleans. His official poster for the fifth-annual Voodoo music festival, which took place over Halloween weekend, introduced a whole new audience to his flamboyant visual style. Other Milton posters are dedicated to basketball and DJ themes. His characters are getting worked up for a dramatic Hollywood turn as subjects in a film or cartoon series, "but I'm chillin' on that idea right now while I'm developing some other things," Milton said.

Milton is a textbook example of how hip-hop-influenced artists have become sought after contemporary art figures. But this scene unfurled in the 1970s as a folk art intended only for the edification of the street players who created and understood it. A product of the south Bronx ghettos of New York, graffiti quickly grew from the voice of New York street life into a rallying cry for a new culture. The movementtushroomed after the 1979 release of "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang ushered in the hip-hop era.

Auspicious Beginnings

Hip hop art's origins are in the graffiti that once stretched the lengths of entire subway trains in New York and other cities. The spray-painted art was considered an urban blight by New York officials, who persecuted the young artists who created it. "The illegal and rebellious nature of this form caused it to he, on the one hand, attacked by the city administration, and on the other, celebrated by artists who recognized its aesthetic value," observed Ivor L. Miller, author of "Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City." "Through their activities, the subway painters remapped the city. By visually communicating via the trains, they drew attention to the city's marginal neighborhoods and the nature of life on the streets." By the mid-1980s, graffiti art, break dancing, hip-hop music and fashion became commodified by Hollywood in the film "Wild Style" and was championed by such mainstream art world figures as Keith Haring.

Hip-hop and rap have come to dominate the record charts as hip-hop fashion has become a driving force of that industry; but the violence in the music's theme and gangsta chic practiced by many of its best-loved figures has kept hip-hop from mainstream approval until very recently.

Too Legit to Quit

In 2000, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland collaborated on a groundbreaking exhibition of hip-hop art, "Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhyme and Rage." Elements of the exhibit ran from interactive DJ "scratch" monitors to Tupac Shakur's black leather vest and the laceless Adidas sneakers once worn by Daryl McDaniels of Run-DMC. But the debate about trip-hop's artistic legitimacy raged alongside it.

On one hand, The New York Times ran several pieces questioning the artistic validity of the concept, while at the same time community activists were outraged that a piece about police brutality, "41 Shots," was eliminated from the exhibition at the least minute.

Nevertheless, BMA director Arnold Lehman enthusiastically promoted the artistic validity of hip-hop culture, arriving for the show's press conference wearing a backwards baseball cap and then declaring "The world is embracing a new attitude."

"An institution like this one has an obligation to be as open as possible when it comes to looking at pop culture," Lehman argued. "I think we are all changing our attitudes toward what is appropriate."

Lehman's words have been prophetic as other hip-hop exhibitions have been mounted since then. The Bronx Museum of the Arts put together a comprehensive historical exhibition covering hip-hop art, "One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art," recently hosted by the Walker Museum in Minneapolis. Artists represented included Haring, lean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Susan Smith-Pinelo, Chris Ofili, Renee Green, Adrian Piper and Gary Simmons. Piper's "Funk Lessons" (1983) and Hammons' "I Am the Greatest!" (2001), a sonic collage of Muhammad Ali's pronouncements, connect hip-hop to other forms of black music and cultural expression.