It’s actually next year that hip-hop will recognize its 50th anniversary. It was on Aug. 11, 1973, that DJ Kool Herc hosted a back-to-school jam in the Bronx to help his little sister raise money for school clothes, and set it off.
But the celebration is going on now, via films, podcasts, museums — including Bentonville’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, whose current exhibit, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse,” offers glimpses of Southern-style hip-hop (Democrat-Gazette Sunday Style, April 10).
Then there’s “And the Beat Don’t Stop: 50 Years of Hip-Hop,” now showing at Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock. Kicking off the exhibit’s April 7 opening was a party Kool Herc would have sanctioned: dueling DJs, a 360-degree photo booth, graffiti artists in the parking lot, poets from Philander Smith College, and break dancing.
Flash back to two days before that opening. The artifacts — most of which are part of a traveling exhibit from the National Hip-Hop Museum’s Pop Up Experience — are almost in place. Especially the sneakers … positioned to be the first things visitors notice.
The sneakers — all sizes, shapes, colors and designs, bearing such brands as Adidas and Patrick Ewing, and customized for and signed by artists — are not only already encased in glassed-in display shelves; they’re all carefully wrapped in plastic.
[RELATED: Events to dovetail with hip-hop exhibit]
(Arkansas…
