AGO’s hip-hop show investigates the music genre through pop culture, with a sprinkling of fine art

There is music playing on the fifth floor of the Art Gallery of Ontario these days – a fairly loud track of contemporary rhythms interrupting the usual hush. Stick around long enough, and you will clearly hear Drake singing his 2016 hit Hotline Bling as the backdrop to a touring exhibition about hip-hop culture.

Art museum shows on musical themes can be counterintuitive, an attempt to use the visual to talk about the aural. The AGO’s 2022-23 Leonard Cohen show was an archival exhibition, strong on Cohen’s drawings, poetry and lyrics without much reference to his tunes. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has hosted several shows linking art and music: The most recent, a 2022 exhibition about Jean-Michel Basquiat, began with information on the New York club scene of the 1980s but was more convincing when simply revealing the musical inspiration behind the artist’s best and biggest canvases.

In concentrating on an entire movement, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st century, is something a bit different, a show in which fine art is sprinkled through an investigation of pop culture, with no hierarchy implied. Drake’s Moncler red puffer jacket is enshrined in its own room in a section on adornment while work by American artists such as Jordan Casteel and Jayson Musson offers a backdrop to a display of hip-hop fashion.

The show was organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum in Missouri and makes this one Canadian stop courtesy of the AGO’s Global Africa curator Julie Crooks. It marks the 50th anniversary of hip hop, which dates back to the first DJ who scratched records in the 1970s, but it’s not a history of the genre. Instead, it investigates how hip hop’s themes bleed into the larger culture. Six themes are identified as central: language (including graffiti); brand (the streetwear display); the related category of adornment; tribute (about legacy and self-referentiality); pose (about body and gesture); and ascension (about mortality and spirituality).

The displays mix fine art with items that are more artifact or record: Lil’ Kim’s brightly coloured stage wigs emblazoned with high-end logos; South African photographer Zanele Muholi’s photograph of Toronto multimedia artist Kalmplex; or Caitlin Cronenberg’s photograph of Drake on top of the CN tower, shot as the cover for his 2016 album Views.

Some of the art takes hip hop’s themes or trappings and successfully pursues them into the layered and ambiguous realm that is contemporary art. Draping a piece of vinyl on the wall, Shinique Smith mixes gestural graffiti with Abstract Expressionism. Similarly, Musson takes a status-symbol – the colourful Australian-brand Coogi sweater – and turns it into an abstract textile hanging while Robert Pruitt traces the routes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in gold chains. Others merely seem to elevate hip hop’s glamour without much analysis, such as Casteel’s painting of a figure in Fendi riding the subway or Roberto Lugo’s ceramic urn commemorating Christopher Wallace, known as the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie, who was shot to death in 1997. To be fair, in Toronto many of these U.S. artists are being seen out of context and could be better understood if represented by multiple examples of their work.

The most powerful pieces straddle both high and low, embracing hip hop’s excess yet complicating it too. For example, the Ghanaian artist Yvonne Osei contributes a 2018 video in which a performer sits at a corner in an Ghanaian neighbourhood while two dexterous women lengthen her blue braids until they reach around the block. The woman then goes for a walk, stopping traffic as she trails these magnificent extensions along the ground in a defiant parade that is both celebratory and extreme.

Similarly, Deana Lawson contributes a 2018 photograph of two shirtless men wearing heavy gold jewellery with one also sporting a dental cheek retractor that protrudes off either side of his face. The artist has superimposed a smaller image of George Washington’s crude dentures that were made of ivory and the teeth of the enslaved, as if to explain the buried motives of the men’s aggressive display.

The Baltimore and St. Louis curatorial team has also included Stan Douglas’s ISDN, the video work he made as Canada’s contribution to the 2022 Venice Biennale. In a fictional cross-continental rap contest set in the 1980s, the piece features two pairs of rappers – one in the U.K., the other in Cairo – rapping in English and Arabic. This is about as complicated as it gets: Douglas is examining the possibilities of cross-cultural communication and how these singers express rebellion, one in a democracy where they experience racism and some poverty; the other in an autocracy where they have few rights.

Douglas was featured in the original show; other Canadian artists have been added for this stop, including on the effective soundscape, where the American composer and producer Wendel Patrick created a new mix specifically for Toronto. As well as all those Drake references, the show includes a redo of the famous 1998 photo of New York’s hip-hop community (itself a redo of A Great Day in Harlem, the 1958 photo of 57 jazz artists). A Great Day in Toronto Hip Hop poses 103 musicians, composers, producers and technicians on the steps of the Liberty Grand for a joyous group photo.

This is as obviously celebratory as The Culture gets. It is also capable of critique with works that push against the misogyny so apparent in hip-hop culture. These include Nina Chanel Abney’s ambiguous 2021 album cover for rapper Meek Mill featuring exaggerated images of nude women; Monica Ikegwu’s high-realist monochromatic red portrait diptych of a young woman in a puffer jacket shown both closed and opened to reveal her tank top; or Tschabalala Self’s painting of her sister’s teenage room with a prominent image of Lil’ Kim on the wall, more provocatively claiming her sexuality.

Still, in the ascension section, the show also includes two giant white columns commemorating rapper Nipsey Hussle without much explanation and a goopy high-realist portrait of Drake staring down his toddler self, created by Kadir Nelson, an illustrator sometimes dismissed as the Black Norman Rockwell. (The columns are another example where a single work suffers from a lack of context: artist Lauren Halsey has staged a whole series of pseudo recreations of ancient architecture elsewhere.) These sections on tribute and ascension could be read as oblique references to the macho cock-of-the-walk contests (Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar) that are the mildest expression of the competitive violence and criminality that are also part of hip hop, but otherwise that aspect is unexamined.

Mainly this exhibition is analytical, exposing the working of hip-hop culture so that the uninitiated might understand why, like the high priest of some ancient cult or a historic fashionista invested in extremes, a contemporary man would want to wear a gold cheek retractor.