Washington, D.C. – Ralph Ellision said it best when he named his hero and his novel “The Invisible Man.” It’s the feeling that black people in America don’t exist with the same degree of public reality as white people do. It’s what this paper is trying to fight when we cry for “inclusion” – a cry that only makes sense when there is and has been exclusion.
If we are going to agitate when black folks are invisible and excluded, then we must celebrate when black folks are visible and included. And, so, we must celebrate the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., for its current main exhibition RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture, which sprawls across many rooms and one long hallway of the museum’s first floor through Oct. 26.
Mind you, this is not just any museum. The National Portrait Gallery forms part of the Smithsonian, the United States’ national museum system. This is our museum, supported by our tax dollars (it receives $5.5 million in federal funds per year), and RECOGNIZE! is the first exhibition ever at the Smithsonian devoted to hip-hop.
The show starts in the hallway, with the one purely visual art that forms part of hip-hop’s core: graffiti. Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp, two graffiti artists based in D.C., were commisioned to create four 20-foot-long murals that are installed in the corridor connecting the exhibit galleries. These spray paintings are not the best work in the show, but they serve an important purpose of inviting the public into a space that has been taken over by hip-hop aesthetics. I found it inspiring to see so many people – many of them young and black, but all kinds – walking down the corridors of our national museum, lit up by the fluroescent colors and crazy energy of graffiti.
The first galleries are devoted to black-and-white photographs that David Scheinbaum took at hip-hop shows in New Mexico and Los Angeles after being dragged into this strange new world by one of his children. Scheinbaum credits Roy DeCarava, who took classic photographs of jazz musicians, with inspiring this series. It is wonderful to see a classic and calm eye focussed on the likes of KRS-One, NAS, Erykah Badu, Common and any number of funky DJs.
But the heart of the exhibition and the real conversation-starters are the mammoth oil paintings of hip-hop icons by Kehinde Wiley, a young African-American artist based in New York.
As sheer displays of technique, these pieces have a “wow” factor equal to their gigantic physical size. People tend to stand and stare at the detailed, realistic portrayal of (say) Ice T posed on a throne, wielding a sceptre. Forget the street-criminal “Cop Killer” of Ice T’s early work; here the dude looks like the ruler of the known universe.
That was the idea. For these portraits, Wiley sat with his subjects (who also include LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) and flipped through an art history book with them. He asked his subjects to suggest an historical portrait as a basis for his new piece about them. Ice T picked Napoleon, because (he said) he had felt like a little guy trying to conquer the world when he came from the West Coast into an art form and industry created on the East Coast and, at that time, completely dominated by East Coast artists and labels.
That makes for a good story and a great painting on its own. But Wiley – who hails from L.A. himself, and studied art at Yale University – is up to much more.
By blending Ice T with Naploeon (or LL Cool J with John D. Rockefeller), he flatters their sense of vanity. He represents the massive egos we all known from hip-hop lyrics, where the dude at the mic (whoever he is, and however much or little he has accomplished) tends to boast about his prowess in all things. Wiley also acknowledges that a generation of poor black men have rapped and hustled their way into vast fame and fortune. They have climbed the throne.
But he is up to even more than that.
Posing Ice T as Napoleon allows a commentary on Napoleon and his time, as much as it does on Ice T and ours. It reminds us that violence and bloodshed are much older than the first rap beef. The gun was used to make and break many fortunes before the first Death Row Records shakedown. And the thirst for bling is older than the first gold tooth – it’s older than the first gold digger.
Carolyn K. Carr, acting director of the National Portrait Gallery, makes this point in her own hip way: “Of particular interest is the way that the works in this show use the hip hop concepts of sampling and re-mixing by taking visual images from the past and re-imagining them.”
The exhibit also includes video self-portraits by Jefferson Pinder, and the pairing of a new Nikki Giovanni poem with an installation by Brooklyn-based artist Shinique Smith. As Nikki says to the hip-hop generation:
You are just
Trying to show the heartful soul of your people
You are just
Trying to say, “I’m alive.”
Hip-hop is alive. Black folks – including the young black folks that terrify so many people – are alive. They are alive and visible at the National Portrait Gallery.
Recognize! was curated b Brandon Brame Fortune, Frank H. Goodyear III and Jobyl A. Boone. The National Portrait Gallery is located at Eighth and F streets N.W. in Washington, D.C. Call (202) 633-1000 or visit www.npg.si.edu.
