Exhibition at Bronx Museum celebrates 50 years of hip-hop

“Two Turntables and a Microphone” is a brand new exhibition on the Bronx Museum that celebrates 50 years of hip-hop.

The exhibition options work, sculptures, movies, pictures and extra from artist and Bronx native Dianne Smith, who grew up within the Bronx within the Nineteen Seventies as hip-hop was creating.

“It was about the block parties. It was about the jams in the park,” Smith mentioned.

Smith went to highschool with future hip-hop stars Slick Rick and Dana Dane at Fiorello H. LaGuardia Excessive College of Music and Artwork and Performing Arts.

“This exhibition is sort of an homage to that time, an homage to what it meant to be a kid in the Bronx in the 1970s. And it does take a journey to the present, but it really started in those beginning days,” Smith mentioned.

An interactive wall on the exhibition permits guests to write down about what hip-hop means to them. There are additionally classic tv units, growth containers and even an outdated Walkman.

Exhibition curator Peter Wright, identified professionally as Souleo, hopes the exhibition elicits emotions of pleasure, empowerment and group to all who go to.

“There’s a lot of conversation about the negative aspects of hip-hop, and those conversations are important, but let’s remember that hip-hop has so many positive elements and we need to amplify those. It’s really a tool for community building and creative expression, so we want to celebrate that,” Wright mentioned. 

For the museum on the Grand Concourse the place admission is at all times free, the exhibition is a no brainer. It’s situated a brief distance from the place hip-hop was born.

As legend has it, hip-hop all began at a back-to-school social gathering at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue within the Bronx, the place DJ Kool Herc set the usual for future use of two turntables, highlighting a document’s “break.”

“To connect with [Smith] and [Wright] on this project has just been an amazing journey,” mentioned Eileen Jeng Lynch, the director of curatorial packages on the Bronx Museum.

It’s Smith’s first exhibition on the Bronx Museum — a homecoming for her since she grew up close by. 

“I want people — particularly Bronx residents — to come to this exhibition and feel a sense of pride, feel like they have been seen, feel like their story has been told in a very holistic way, and that they matter — that we matter,” Smith mentioned. “All types of people come from the Bronx.”

The exhibition runs via Aug. 20, and admission is free. There will probably be a sequence of packages on the museum coinciding with the exhibition.