We’re looking ahead this week on The Do List to a few exhibitions we’re excited about in 2018, among them Respect: Hip-Hop Style and Wisdom, opening in March at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA). Respect is part of a trend at the Oakland Museum and other institutions to take serious looks at pop culture. (OMCA presented a show about sneakers recently.)
“Hip-hop is misunderstood,” OMCA Senior Curator René de Guzman says, “that it’s all about gangsterism and misogyny. There are elements of that, just as there are negative elements in any cultural form or social group. The other misunderstanding is that hip-hop is simply a music genre, but it extends beyond that to include not only other art forms but principles, values and communities.”
So the exhibit, de Guzman says, will dig deep into hip-hop’s message of authenticity and political activism, with input from Bay Area icons like Oakland rapper and scholar Mystic and the Hip-Hop Chess Federation’s Adisa Banjoko.
My colleague Gabe Meline notes that the show promises to cover the music “beyond big business.” So he’s keen to see how the exhibition covers hustling pioneers like Heiroglyphics and Too Short, who sold tapes out of their trunks in Oakland to build their empires. Details here.
