35 Years of Virginia Hip-Hop History and Culture
Photograph of the crowd at Hip Hop Universal in the summer of 2002.
Gift of Dan Tres Omi, Mss. Acc. 2013.099
Virginia youth absorbed emerging hip-hop culture from a variety of sources including popular culture, and national and international travel and migration. Almost immediately after its introduction, hip-hop culture and Virginia became inextricable. The hip-hop culture crafted in, emerging from, and inspired by Virginia has transformed American and global culture. Over the last 35 years, hip-hop from the Old Dominion has allowed individual Virginians and their communities to create new forms of cultural and economic capital, impacting their home state and beyond.
This exhibit explores Virginia's 35 years of hip-hop history through oral histories, curated playlists, artifacts, posters, and other archival materials in the William & Mary Hip Hop Collection. Artists and radio personalities curated playlists to represent Virginia-born or Virginia-based hip-hop music; a listing of those playlists featured in the exhibit can be found on the W&M Hip Hop Collection's companion website.
Images of the exhibit are available from Swem Library on Flickr.
Curator: Kevin Kosanovich, Special Collections Instructor and Research Associate and Founder of the William & Mary Hip Hop Collection; Exhibit design: Jennie Davy, Burger Archives Specialist, with assistance from Andrew Cavell, SCRC Graphics Assistant, and Kelly Manno, Undergraduate Student Assistant.
To learn more about Kevin's experience curating this exhibit, see the Special Collections blog, An Acquired Taste, for his blog post: "From Collection to Exhibit".