When I was about 12 years old looking through some Playboy magazines purloined from my father’s closet, I studied imagery that resembled some of the postmodern feminist works found in the Ringling Museum exhibition Beyond Bling: Voices of Hip-Hop in Art. What submerged in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s during hippie years, feminist years, and corporate power years has re-emerged here looking fresher than before the days of bra-burning and women wearing neck ties. A cluster of elderly women gazing at Mickalene Thomas’s work, Naughty Girls (Need Love, too), 2009, inquired, “How do you think she got into that pose and remained that way long enough for a photograph, much less a painting?” If you have to ask… fine arts magazine

The artist Sofia Maldonado goes so seamlessly into her characters that their depiction is both objectified and personified. What was once dysfunctional and hidden from view is embraced here, examined, and brought to life in figures that jump off the picture plane and into your consciousness faster that you can say faux leopard bikini. The question becomes not, why are these pictures on the wall? But, what took them so long to get there? 

Matthew McLendon, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, has balanced as compellingly the male imagery in the exhibition narrative. African American male portraiture by Kehinde Wiley, (Simon Georgel, 2006), lavish machismo with its underlying nod to the down-low and in-your-face materialism, to the squeamishly accurate and meticulously rendered photography of Vince Fraser, (Bling Pop, 2006-2007, above), gathers fleeting and nostalgic notions into a collective of gender bending identity. Virile, sensate men may not have been driven as far underground as Playboy bunnies once were, but they have burst forth just as flagrantly. Perhaps it was when Sean Combs put his fist in the air wearing a Nike sweat suit on Times Square that we could no longer look away. 

Beyond Bling comprises ten international artists’ works in paint, collage, and photographic mediums that bear witness to the gods and goddesses of ghetto fabulousness, Asian enclaves and Latino cultures. Integration into the cultural mainstream is now substituted as being the cultural mainstream. The imagery signals more than the fusion of High/Low Art envisioned by the late and brilliant MoMA curator Kirk Varnedoe; it goes past the de rigueur, pitch-perfect capture of cultural role models to encapsulate a contemporary compendium of what to wear on the red carpet. The cult of celebrity derived from pin-up princesses and princes may be the ultimate crossover anointing, but really the exhibition is non-tautalogical. It’s Why fight the feeling? First we have to go there – immerse, not step away – to evolve the dialogue as to where this moment takes us. 

Beyond Bling, a thoughtful installation in a museum known for its formidable Old Masters collection, (another assemblage of portraiture and mythologies, after all), imparts the power of Hip-Hop influenced art without intimidation. Once perceived as undermining or subversive, here the viewer revels in the art, an after effect of its displacement. The statement is, this is what it means to be alive in the multiplicity and diversity of the 21st century: Dr. McLendon made his opening remark simply: “This is the art of our time.” 

To mount an exhibition of art influenced by the street: graffiti –Gajin Fujita’s Sky High, where beauty and street script merge in Asian mural painting –skateboarding, break dancing, and the towering legacy of Hip-Hop – possibly the first return of linguistic concern concentrated in art since Beat poetry – means the walls are disappearing outside and the art, and the artists, are coming inside. (The extraordinarily resonant Sofia Maldonado will complete a one month residency at the Ringling Museum campus.) King Yo on the queen, yo! By Iona Rozeal Brown (2010), sums up this conflation of the ritualized and fetishized with what once was too precious and sterile – art – notes that art still serves to deify urban gods, and takes as its subject, life. In this way, Beyond Bling becomes a contemporary classic. 

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer 

On Exhibition from May 21-August 14, 2011 

John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida 

www.ringling.org