Recognize! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture

Recognize! has started in February 8th and goes on until October 26th of this year. The show is exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. The artists involved in the exhibit were influenced by the new hip hop culture and demonstrate its influence on arts of portraitures today.
The show starts with statements and a quote from LL Cool J’s song, Paradise, on the wall. As if that wasn’t enough to grab audiences’ attention, the main hallway is graffiti of Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. The abstract typography of graffiti had been marked as the face of hip hop culture. However, to these artists, the graffiti are the portraitures of themselves. The graffiti is a self-portraiture of one through his/her chosen word, a tag, and ultimately this tag becomes who s/he is.
Among the pieces displayed, the one that left the biggest impression is the painting of Kehinde Wiley. His portraits are of young African-Americans with the latest hip hop street fashion. However, the objects and the theatrical poses in the scene came from earlier paintings created from seventeenth to nineteenth century. The floral patterns in the background are based on the Baroque style painting, and the throne with red cape and the golden staff are references to the European nobility. Wiley merges history and culture and portrays young black men in urban attire with power similar to European noble families.
Majority of people perceive hip hop as one genre of music. The visual artists, however, demonstrate how hip hop has its own toll on art community through different kinds of media such as photography, paintings, and films. The show is absolutely ‘tight.’ The lifestyle of hip hop was mostly viewed negatively due to the derogatory terms involved in rap music. However, hip hop, to these artists, is just another tool to find identity of themselves and others. This exhibit might change some of the general stereotypes against this new culture.