CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/28/2024

Celebrating Hip Hop and contemporary art, 'The Culture' opens at Cincinnati Art Museum

Featured spreads—featuring work by Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, Nina Chanel Abney, Devin Allen, Joyce J. Scott and Tschabalala Self—are reproduced from The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century. Published for the touring exhibition making stops in Baltimore, Saint Louis Art Museum, Frankfurt and now Cincinnati en route to Toronto through 2025, this volume contains work by more than thirty of the last five decades’ most daring, influential and multifaceted artists and scholars. Curator Asma Naeem writes, “The 21st century has seen the term ‘culture’ contested, protested and dismantled from European high culture to American dominance, and the continued reverberations of imperialism, tyranny and the decolonization of the ‘Third World.’ Museums seem to be a vital frontier in this sense. Hip hop in the 21st century flows with multiculturalism and collaboration, a porousness and fluidity among disciplines, pioneering technology and collectivity. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall acknowledged that Black culture can be defined in response to other cultures, such as white hegemony, and argued that Black popular culture is a complex site where politics and performance are negotiated through a dialogic intertwining of a number of simultaneous identities, being Black and British, for example. As this exhibition attests, the future of the museum lies in an embrace of this site, of the culture, where material culture and entangled social histories—where Sylvia Wynter’s humanness and new systems of knowledge, ones that lie outside of Western precepts, exist—are the future.”