Installation image from The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century
The Saint Louis Art Museum exhibition, The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, features eight artists with ties to the St. Louis region: Damon Davis, Jamal Shabez, Adrian Octavius Walker, Aaron Fowler, Jen Everett, Kahlil Irving, Anthony Akinbola, and Yvonne Osei. Learn more about the artists and their work below.
Damon Davis, American, born 1985; Cracks XIX (EGO), 2022; concrete and homegrown crystals; 8 x 11 x 6 inches; Courtesy the artist; © Damon Davis
Damon Davis (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist based in St. Louis. His work, Cracks XIX (EGO), a bust of concrete and homegrown crystals, is on view in The Culture. The bust is made in Davis’ likeness, shimmering and protective of the concrete sculpture beneath.
A special installation of Davis’s work was on view at SLAM in 2021. Titled All Hands on Deck, the works addressed social justice through original photographs of hands held up high, an idea he conceived during the months-long protests after Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed in Ferguson in 2014.
A highly awarded artist, his documentary about the Ferguson protests, Whose Streets?, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2017 and has received broad critical attention. Among his many other awards, he was named a 2020–2021 Citizen Artist Fellow at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.
Shabez Jamal, American, born 1992; Album Reconstruction No. 4 (After Kimberly), Album Reconstruction No. 5 (After Inga), and Album Reconstruction No. 6 (After Katrina), 2022; mixed media (oak, acrylic sheets, Polaroid images, chromogenic prints, and bronze photo corners); each: 16 1/2 x 14 x 8 inches; Courtesy of the artist 2023.222-224; © Shabez Jamal
Born in St. Louis and based in New Orleans, Shabez Jamal (b. 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on “still portraiture, experimental video, and performance, interrogates physical, political, and social-economical space by using queerness, not as a means of speaking about sexuality, but as a catalyst to challenge varying power relations,” according to his website. Additionally, he cofounded Artists in the Room, a collective with a mission to support the Black arts community in St. Louis.
Jamal has three related works in the exhibition: Album Reconstruction No. 4 (After Kimberly), Album Reconstruction No. 5 (After Inga), and Album Reconstruction No. 6 (After Katrina). The mixed-media works are named after iconic women rappers—Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, and Trina—to celebrate women and their significant role in his life.
Jamal has received a master’s of fine arts degree from Tulane University, where he was awarded a Mellon Community-Engaged Research Fellowship and later taught as a visiting assistant professor. He received a bachelor’s of interdisciplinary studies from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Adrian Octavius Walker, American, born 1988; A Great Day in St. Louis, 2022; archival pigment print; 18 x 36 inches; Courtesy the artist; © Adrian Octavius Walker
Adrian Octavius Walker (b. 1988) is a photographer and mixed-media artist based in Chicago, by way of St. Louis. His work highlights “critical discourse around the imagination in black nostalgia,” asking questions that “inspire viewers to investigate their own biases and opportunities for community engagement,” according to his website. He works as the senior art director at Getty Images.
Walker’s photograph, A Great Day in St. Louis, is featured at the exit of The Culture, continuing a story begun by Gordon Parks’s 1989 photo A Great Day in Hip Hop, which is displayed at the exhibition’s entrance. In Walker’s iteration of the iconic photo, 116 St. Louis rappers, DJs, producers, and more, pose on Art Hill, facing the Museum. Read more about the Walker’s photograph and its predecessors in an earlier blog post.
Aaron Fowler, American, born 1988; Live Culture Force 1's, 2022; car parts and mixed media; each: 60 x 96 x 48 inches; Courtesy of the artist; © Aaron Fowler
Aaron Fowler (b. 1988) is a multimedia artist working between New York City Los Angeles, and St. Louis. His works, largely assembled from found materials, address “American history, identity, black culture, and hip-hop and are also imbued with deeply personal meaning, often containing images or references to family and friends,” according to his biography by the Hammer Museum at UCLA. His larger-than-life pair of Air Force Ones, titled Live Culture Force 1’s, is on view in SLAM’s Sculpture Hall. Each shoe measures 60-by-96-by-48 inches and is made of scavenged car parts.
CBS Sunday Morning featured Fowler in its season opener this year, which highlighted The Culture.
Fowler received a master’s of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art in 2014 and bachelor’s of fine arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 2011.
Jen Everett, American, born 1981; from the series Unheard Sounds, Come Through (detail), 2022; wooden speakers, cassette tapes, vinyl recording sleeves, cassette player, vinyl print, and transistor radios; 60 x 36 x 13 inches; Courtesy of the artist; © Jen Everett, Image courtesy of Baltimore Museum of Art, Photo: Mitro Hood
Born in Southfield, Michigan, and working in St. Louis, Jen Everett (b. 1981), is an artist whose work varies between lens- and time-based media, installation, and writing. She explores the ways Black people produce and share knowledge despite restrictive social structures.
Her work in The Culture is titled Unheard Sounds, Come Through: Extended Mix. The sculpture repurposes wooden speakers, boom boxes, cassette tapes, and more, to form a completely new figure that reminds the viewer how sound has transformed through hip hop’s lifespan.
Everett received a master’s of fine arts degree from Washington University in St. Louis where she was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She received a bachelor of architecture from Tuskegee University.
Kahlil Robert Irving, American, born 1992; Arches & standards (Stockley ain't the only one) Meisson Matter: STL matter with pedestal wallpaper, 2018/2020; glazed and unglazed ceramic, luster, found and personally constructed; 16 x 16 1/2 inches; Courtesy of the artist; © Kahlil Robert Irving, Image courtesy of Baltimore Museum of Art, Photo: Mitro Hood
Kahlil Irving opened his first museum solo exhibition, Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving, at the Museum of Modern Art in 2021. He was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award in 2019 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2020.
Irving’s work, Arches & standards (Stockley ain’t the only one) Meissen Matter: STL, created in 2018, is featured in The Culture. The ceramic sculpture incorporates images of cigarette butts and corporate logos, referencing Meissen (a famous German porcelain) and juxtaposing it with police violence in St. Louis with images of Jason Stockley, an officer acquitted for the murder of Anthony Lamar Smith.
Irving received a bachelor’s of fine arts degree from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2015 and was a master’s of fine arts fellow in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art at Washington University in 2017.
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, American, born 1981; Camouflage #105 (Metropolis), 2020; durags and acrylic on wood panel; 96 x 96 inches; Keith Rivers Collection; © Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola
Anthony Akinbola (b. 1991) is a multimedia artist born in Columbia, Missouri, and raised between Missouri and Nigeria. His work is mainly painting and sculpture that rejects conventional techniques with self-developed color and texture treatments. Akinbola examines the experience of a first-generation Nigerian American and the diverse cultures of Africa and Black America.
His work, CAMOUFLAGE #105 (Metropolis), on display in The Culture, is a four-panel piece that employs reworked black durags to both absorb and reflect light, bringing an abstract monochrome painting into conversation with the culture of Black adornment.
Yvonne Osei, born 1990; EXTENSIONS, 2018; single-channel video; 6 minutes 4 seconds; Courtesy the artist and Bruno David Gallery; © Yvonne Osei
Yvonne Osei, a Ghanaian multimedia artist, focuses on themes of beauty, colorism, clothing, global trade, and colonialism in her work. She was the 2016-2017 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum and the inaugural curator-in-residence for the Millstone Gallery at the Center of Creative Arts. Her work, EXTENSIONS, featured in The Culture, is a single-channel video filmed in Asafo, Ghana. A still from this work is present around the community on SLAM billboards, posters, and advertisements.
Osei received a master’s of fine arts degree in 2016 from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow and Mr. and Mrs. Spencer T. Olin Fellow. She received a bachelor’s of fine arts from Webster University where she later worked as an adjunct professor.
The Culture is on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum until January 1, 2024.
