The Sound of Light: Reflections on Art History in the Visual Culture of Hip-Hop

Abstract

Contemporary visual expressions of hip-hop have popularized approaches to visibility among black youth. These practices emphasize the effect of being seen and being represented, especially the optical effects of light and shiny reflection. Studio artists Kehinde Wiley and Luis Gispert draw on these representational strategies of hip-hop to refashion art history, bringing the painterly techniques that created optical illusion in late Renaissance and Baroque painting especially to the surface in their work. They also use hip-hop's visual language to highlight the surface aesthetics of race, the hypervisibility of blackness in contemporary consumer culture, and the blinding limits of visuality.