Hip-hop hooray — St. Louis Art Museum launches hip-hop exhibition with block party

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Bronx block party hosted by siblings Cindy Campbell and DJ Kool Herc that hip-hop historians consider the birth of the musical genre.

The St. Louis Art Museum is throwing a block party of its own Saturday to open a major exhibition on the global influence of hip-hop and the culture it’s spawned.

“The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” is a collaboration between SLAM and the Baltimore Museum of Art, which hosted the show earlier this year. After its run at SLAM ends on Jan. 1, the exhibition will travel to museums in Germany, Ontario and Cincinnati.

Curators worked with a 20-person panel of visual artists, rappers, scholars and other experts to assemble the wide-ranging exhibition. The panel included St. Louis multidisciplinary artist Damon Davis and rapper-activist-educator Tef Poe.

“As art museums, we did not presume that we have all of the knowledge we needed to produce an exhibition on hip-hop. The curatorial team started from a deep respect and understanding of how hip-hop grew from local, grassroots, community engagement,” SLAM Director Min Jung Kim told a group of artists and reporters this week. “Our aim was to speak to as many people as possible, and truly to listen.”

The exhibition’s 130 items include paintings, photographs, videos, music, sculpture and multimedia installations.