Holy Ground: How the Spirit of Chicago Shaped Hip-Hop
Chicago, 1992. An underground revolution ready to burst into broad public consciousness. A budding producing icon, a young girl ready to have her eyes opened. A spark, an album, a world changed.
With the release of Can I Borrow a Dollar? Chicago’s hip-hop scene burst onto the world stage, shaped by Grammy-winning producer, The Twilite Tone, whose collaborations with Kanye West, the Gorillaz, and Kendrick Lamar continue to shift the hip-hop landscape today. At that time, Lola Wright found truth in venues like LitEx and Alcatraz, finding a vibrant community that influences her work with the Bodhi Spiritual Center today. The places in Chicago where hip-hop was made and experienced changed the form of the genre — and the people whose lives it touched. Space was more than a studio or a club. It was a spirit.
To explore this story, Chicago Ideas is bringing these thought-leaders to the Patron Gallery for an interactive preview of Myra Greene’s Minor Chord—an exhibition that touches on the shifting nature of photography and how our understanding of color is dependent on context—in order to jumpstart an experiential Lab that dives into the history and impact of Chicago on an iconic American art form: hip-hop.
