A lesson on Hip Hop Culture

I'm really excited about this event at this charter school here in the Bronx called Casita Maria.... This is a topic I have been dying to tackle, so when a good sister who is in charge of this series and I spoke about her having me come out to do one of the sessions, I was honored.

Hip Hop and the Politics of Indentity and Representation

​Saturday, January 16, 2016 from 5 PM - 7 PM

The Elements of Culture Performance Lecture Series is designed to provide the audience with a powerful and positive delivery of performative storytelling, socio-political perspective, and a value-based lecture, one that is True to Hip-Hop, Afrikan, Indigenous to Culture. 

Developed in the 1960s as a sub-genre of Performance Art, the Lecture Performance has returned within the field of contemporary art during the last decade. In 1964, the American artist Robert Morris life-synchronized 21 minutes video documentation of a lecture by the famous art historian Erwin Panofsky in front of a New York audience. Morris used the purely reflexive format of the lecture, arguably for the first time as an artistic medium, toquestion the established conceptions of the artwork and of the mechanisms of the art context during his performance. 

Throughout the following decades, artists like Dan Graham (Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1975), Joseph Beuys (Jeder Mensch ein Künstler – Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus/Each Person an Artist – on the Way to the Freedom Figure of the Social Organism, 1978) and Andrea Fraser (Museum Highlights, 1989) encouraged this development. While Morris thematized language/how to speak about art, Graham focused on the viewer, and Fraser reflected the institutional surrounding. With the new crop of Lecture Performance, the format has expanded to include a range of issues that fall outside the previous focus on the specificity/critique of art. The use of the format in contemporary art can be explored initially based on two aspects: the rising value of conversation as medium to produce knowledge within a hyper communicative world and the role of contemporary (theoretically leaning) artists within education.

The Elements of Culture Performance Lecture Series is a platform for those who understand the relationship between art and knowledge, art and research, art and socio-political justice, and don so via a Hip-Hop Cultural lense. This Series will operate as a space in potential, one in which art, life and society is deconstructed, recontructed as well as created via an intimate, honest and open conversation between the artist and the audience.

- The Symbol
- All is Love