What’s Happening: The Baltimore Museum of Art and Saint Louis Art Museum have become the latest institutions to showcase the genre’s all-encompassing influence.

The Download: Hip hop is having a museum moment. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the genre’s birth in New York City, local institutions like the Museum at FIT, the Brooklyn Museum, and Fotografiska have all showcased how hip hop has shaped key parts of American culture as we know it today.

Where those shows offered a targeted analysis of the music and its creators’ influence on photography (Fotografiska) or carceral reform advocacy (the Brooklyn Museum), “Hip Hop and Contemporary Art” takes a wide-angle approach. The joint exhibition between the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Saint Louis Art Museum looks beyond fine art to fashion, technology, and music both internationally and in the U.S.

One of the show’s biggest strengths lies in its easy-to-follow examples of the genre’s seismic impact. Take a giant pair of Nike Air Force Ones created by Saint Louis artist Aaron Fowler. The exhibition creates a throughline between Fowler’s art, Nelly’s 2002 single “Air Force Ones,” and the pressure applied to Nike by Baltimore shoe stores to reissue the model after it was discontinued in 1984. Without hip hop’s cultural and economic sway, AF1s likely would have faded from memory altogether. It’s a bold curatorial narrative that doesn’t require an MFA to make sense of.

The show also has a number of gems for the crowd who knows their Telfar from their Wales Bonner and assiduously hunts for Virgil Abloh-era Louis Vuitton on The Real Real. Garments from each of these designers and Dapper Dan for Gucci, adidas Originals by Pharrell, and Baby Phat showcase hip hop’s grasp on fashion, breaking high-low boundaries.

Of course, the relationship between fine artists and hip hop is anything but an afterthought in a show that gives art the title focus. A dizzying catalog of works by both rising and established stars including Carrie Mae Weems, Julie Mehretu, Hank Willis Thomas, Derrick Adams, Hassan Hajjaj, and Lauren Halsey are among its biggest highlights. “Hip Hop and Contemporary Art” really shines in its refusal to assign hierarchy to hip hop’s sprawling influence, as if to say “It’s all part of the culture.”

In Their Own Words: “Hip hop’s impact, meaning, and influence are both imperceivable and obvious, and are felt, in equal measure, across both mainstream culture and fine art,” says Asma Naeem, the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director of the Baltimore Museum of Art. “We’re developing a greater depth of scholarship about hip hop and how it appears as its own canon in so many aspects of art, allowing us to better understand the reasons why it has so deeply embedded itself in the global psyche.”

Surface Says: Hip hop’s final frontier: a Met Gala theme.

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The art world has collectively sat at the edge of its seat ever since the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Lauren Halsey’s rooftop commission would be delayed by one year due to logistics. But after some time (and a little help from Hästens), the highly anticipated showcase finally opened this week. “It became more ambitious, more meaningful, and more important,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director, said at the show’s press preview.

It certainly checks those boxes—Halsey uses 750 glass-fiber-reinforced concrete tiles to create a 22-foot-tall structure that resembles an Egyptian-style temple, complete with four large-scale sphinx statues whose faces mimic members of her immediate family. Carved on the walls are graffiti tags, images pulled from Black-owned businesses, and other street signage from Halsey’s home in South Los Angeles. The installation plans to travel across the country there, specifically to her Summaeverythang community center, when it closes at the Met in October.

To celebrate 4/20, we’re revisiting a conversation between Santiago Rodriguez Tarditi and David Paleschuck about creativity and cannabis.

As legalization continues to ripple across Canada, USA, and the rest of the world, cannabis has taken a contemporary leap that has taken it from the grungy stoner days to an educated and refined industry that caters to everyone who’s a friend of the plant. From the rebellious to the CEOs, the hippies, the yuppies, the mommas and the poppas: there’s a product for each kind of consumer.

Osanna Visconti grew up in Rome surrounded by exquisite artworks by Lucio Fontana, Mario Ceroli, and Arnaldo Pomodoro, which surely inspired forays into jewelry and product design. The latter stuck, and from her newly expanded Milanese atelier she crafts nature-inspired “jewels for the home” using lost wax casting—her pieces, which she hand-sculpts from liquid bronze, recall the delicate beauty of nature yet wield an ancient glow.

When: Until July 3

Where: The Art Institute of Chicago

What: The multidisciplinary artist uses textiles to upend notions of domesticity and femininity with her monumental embroidered portraits. With each portrait, the artist, who grew up in the Bahamas, emphasizes her sitters’ style as an exploration of Blackness and womanhood. The show’s title even references a Bahamian compliment: “It holds a lot of positivity and joy,” she says. “It also speaks to the tone of confidence and power that I want to create with these works.”

Chairs often steal the spotlight in design conversations. That’s especially true when it comes to Charles and Ray Eames, the midcentury visionaries whose repertoire of molded plastic and plywood chairs set a new benchmark for mass-producing desirable products using novel fabrication techniques. While chairs indeed present an agonizing design challenge, tables are far simpler. “It’s just a base and a top,” says Llisa Demetrios, granddaughter to the Eames and the chief curator of the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity, which recently opened “Tables! Tables! Tables!”, a digital show about the couple’s experiments in table design. “They’re so well-designed, you forget they were designed at all.”

Flavor Paper is a Brooklyn-based wallpaper company that specializes in hand-screened and digitally printed designs. Flavor Paper is eco-friendly, using water-based inks and PVC-free materials when possible. All products are print-to-order for easy customization. Residential, commercial, and specialty products are available.

Surface Says: This studio’s colorful creations are a feast for the eyes, and sometimes even the nose. Their range of clever and often humorous designs includes Pop Art–inspired scratch-and-sniff options.

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