Smithsonian is a natural setting for the culture of hip-hop

Washington, D.C.

If you're in the District and into music culture, consider stopping at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery to check out "RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture."

The exhibit looks at hip-hop culture through a mostly visual perspective: There are paintings, films, photographs and an installation celebrating the culture that went from the Bronx ghettos to global phenomenon.

Seeing hip-hop in a museum setting is an exciting prospect, not because a curator's authority lends hip-hop artistic credibility. Hip-hop established that long ago. Seeing it in a museum is cool because it is such a vast, complex culture encompassing so many tangible elements - writing, clothing, toys and more - that it has been unable to contain itself to stereos and concert stages.

Hip-hop should have been in museums a long time ago.

Many museums have gotten hip to this idea. Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry had a hip-hop exhibition that ended in 2002. The Smithsonian is stockpiling artifacts from luminaries for "Hip-Hop Won't Stop: The Beat, the Rhymes, the Life" for the National Museum of American History. A hip-hop museum is being constructed in the Bronx, albeit with a debate over whether a section on "gangsta rap" should be financed with city funds. "Holy Hip-Hop! New Paintings by Alex Melamid" just wrapped up at Detroit's Museum of Contemporary Art.

This last collection probably is most in line with the one at the National Portrait Gallery, a branch of the Smithsonian near Chinatown, because both feature paintings of rap megastars. In addition to paintings, "RECOGNIZE!" looks at graffiti, film and photography.

Paintings are by the fabulous Kehinde Wiley, whose work has appeared at the Brooklyn Museum, Deitch Projects and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. His work depicts black men in hip-hop garb mimicking poses from the Renaissance, often with ornate baroque or rococo patterned backgrounds. Here, Wiley's subjects are Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, LL Cool J and Big Daddy Kane. These are fantastic, but feel like bait, trophy pieces. For some reason, Wiley's paintings seem most intriguing when the subjects are anonymous, and there are a few here.

Artist Jefferson Pinder, who considers his videos a form of the hip-hop techniques sampling and remixing, contributes three works. One is of a black man wearing a suit with a harness attached to his back. He is dragging a hunk of metal that is intended to represent the weight of his struggle, but it is an obvious and pat metaphor. Another piece depicts him inside a car as it goes through a car wash; Pinder's online audio explanation waxes about color, but, like the piece itself, it fails to convey any real relationship to hip-hop. Only the piece mimicking the first few pages of Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man," in which Pinder stands under a number of hanging light bulbs, has some real bite; again, though, its connection to hip-hop is debatable at best.

Nikki Giovanni, however, turns in an impressive piece. Giovanni's work, particularly the protest poems from early in her career, has inspired many hip-hop artists. (Her love of hip-hop is well documented, and she has THUG LIFE tattooed on her forearms in dedication to Tupac Shakur.) Giovanni turns in a thrilling poem, "It's Not a Just Situation: Though We Just Can't Keep Crying About It (For the Hip-Hop Nation That Brings Us Such Exciting Art)," that is etched onto a white wall and narrated by her over speakers. The poem confronts and dismisses the notion that rappers and graffiti artists are just passing time but instead are reaching into the depths of their very existence to produce art, often in spite of miserable surroundings.

In response, Baltimore-based artist Shinique Smith constructed an installation that is a whimsical visual representation of Giovanni's poem and the cacophony, beauty and suffering of the city.

There also are a number of black and white photographs of hip-hop entertainers, including one of Virginia Beach's Pharrell Williams as he performed with his rock trio N.E.R.D.

Lastly, graffiti artists offer some murals, which hang in the hallway. These are rich, enticing pieces that illustrate why spray- can art (not to be confused with random scribbles or "tags" that deface property) should be as highly regarded as sculpture or oil-on-canvas. The exhibit could have gone further to explain the process by which one decodes graffiti, which is often cryptic and takes training to unlock visually.

That was the whole point of this, right?

Overall, this is a smart, if small, exhibit. At the very least, it's a way to lure in the young'uns while you sneak off to the permanent collections.

Malcolm Venable, (757) 446-2662, malcolm.venable@pilotonline.com