What’s Missing From Ice Cold, the Hip-Hop Jewelry Exhibition
The exhibition invites viewers to interrogate how race shapes our understanding of taste, but there were some gaps in storytelling.
In the average New Yorker’s mind, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) is where you take your kids to learn about animal species or hear Neil Degrasse Tyson use simple terms to teach physics. A destination for fashion? Not so much, but this was until the opening of Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry in early May.
A hip-hop exhibition at the AMNH? I was skeptical at first then I started looking into the team behind it, which led me to the recently appointed president Sean M. Decatur (the first African-American to serve in this role since the museum’s founding in April 1869). Decatur made a somewhat convincing connection in the press release, saying: “Throughout the Museum, you’ll see objects that open a window onto our shared past or our current world, whether that’s nature, science, or culture. In Ice Cold, the objects are magnificent jewelry pieces and the window opens into one of the most powerful social and cultural forces of the past 50 years, Hip Hop.”
At the opening night, the energy was high as a mix of hip hop stars, stylists and other fashion people crowded the new wing of the museum. The show spans the decades since the 1980s when artists like Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Lil Kim sought to differentiate themselves through what they wear. Generally shunned by the establishment, they gravitated towards highly expressive clothing and accessories, creating a subculture that would eventually permeate the mainstream. The earliest iterations are the nameplate necklaces, which functioned as powerful tokens of identity for Black and Latino communities. Academic historians Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower traced the origins of the accessory in their excellent book, The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture and Identity.
As time went on, other styles of hip-hop jewelry rose to the fore. As rappers shopped on Canal Street or at Albee Square in Queens, they worked with local jewelers (Jacob “the Jeweler” was the most in demand) to craft one-of-a-kind pieces created in their image. Enter gold chains, grillz, four-finger rings, and bracelets that are as dazzling as they are unique. If they’re all very different, the through line is in the way they capture the individual’s life style and affirm their personhood in the face of historical erasure. By highlighting these pieces worn by some of hip hop’s biggest names (Slick Rick, Jay-Z, Ghost Face Killah, Nicki Minaj), Ice Cold not only pays homage to this rich visual legacy, but it also invites viewers to interrogate how race shapes our understanding of taste.
The execution is where the show fell short. As has been my experience with past fashion exhibitions (especially those that platform minorities like Africa Fashion in Brooklyn or Women Dressing Women at the Costume Institute), it felt like they threw as much as they could in there without the deep dives that put everything in context. In a Q&A with National Jeweler, the author Vikki Tobak, who wrote the book Ice Cold: A Hip-hop Jewelry History, admitted they should’ve taken longer to put the show together (it was done in only a year).