Hop to it: Bronx-born musical genre’s culture unfolds at Frankfurt exhibition

A photo of Robert Lugo’s glazed ceramic “Street Shrine 1: A Notorious Story (Biggie),” on display at “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” at the Schirn in Frankfurt, Germany. (Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes) A new arrival at the famed Schirn exhibition hall in Frankfurt examines the influence of hip-hop, a musical genre that started as a block party 50 years ago in the Bronx borough of New York and transformed into a global movement. “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” is a polyphonic experience of fashion, photography, sculpture, video, painting and more, as curator Andrea Purnell of the Saint Louis Art Museum describes it. On display are more than 100 works by more than 80 artists. They range from an album cover by Rammellzee and K-Rob, with Jean-Michel Basquiat, to an Adidas track jacket designed by Pharrell Williams, to Kahlil Joseph’s “m.A.A.D.,” a two-channel video installation set to music by Kendrick Lamar. “The Culture” was first shown last year at the Saint Louis Art Museum and at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Frankfurt, often called the German capital of hip-hop, is its only European stop. A detail photo of Devan...