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MOPOP’s Hip-Hop History Month celebration on November 8 will be a full-volume tribute to culture—featuring DJ demos, album listening sessions, select screenings from the 2025 Seattle Hip Hop Film Festival, and the launch of MOPOP’s special edition Guest Curator exhibition: Beats + Rhymes: A Collective Narrative of Hip Hop.
Curated by Guest Curators Syreeta Gates, Abstract Kouadio, and MOPOP’s 2025 Youth Advisory Board, the exhibition amplifies hip-hop’s five foundational pillars—MCing, DJing, Graffiti, Knowledge of Self, and Breakdancing—through costumes, ephemera, photos, and more. We caught up with the Guest Curators for a behind-the-scenes look at how it all came together.
Gates is a creative and archivist dedicated to celebrating history innovatively. As founder of The Gates Preserve, she safeguards legacies, and through Most Incredible Studio, transforms ephemeral memories into tangible LEGO-based creations.
As a guest curator, you focused on a specific pillar of Hip-Hop. Can you share which pillar you worked on, why it resonated with you personally, and how you approached representing it through the artifacts and stories?
I built this section around Knowledge — the pillar that doesn’t always get its shine, but it’s the foundation that holds everything else up. For me, knowledge is receipts: magazines, flyers, shirts, spray cans — proof that our brilliance left a mark. As an archivist, I approach these objects not as nostalgia, but as blueprints. Each artifact carries instructions for how we’ve always documented ourselves, how we’ve always imagined more, and how we keep building.
Hip-Hop is often celebrated for its music, but this exhibition highlights it as a broader cultural movement. How did you approach telling the story of Hip-Hop beyond the songs themselves?
Hip-Hop is rhythm, but it’s also texture, paper, ink, and brick. The story lives in objects that traveled through people’s hands and homes — a boombox that turned sidewalks into stages, a newspaper that sparked organizers, a film that turned lived experience into cinema. I leaned into these receipts because they remind us that hip hop has always been about more than sound. It’s about what we made visible, what we passed forward, and what we insisted would not be erased.
Through this exhibition, what do you hope visitors take away about the power of Hip-Hop as a form of storytelling, resistance, and cultural expression?
I want visitors to see that these receipts are alive. They carry brilliance, struggle, and joy — not locked in the past, but shaping how we move now. My hope is that people don’t just look at the archive but add to it. Share your own story, your own artifact, your own receipt of hip hop memory. Tag it #LiveFromTheArchive so together we keep building what we know to be true.
Kouadio is a versatile curator and museum professional with extensive experience in academia, museum studies, and Hip-Hop culture. As the former Curatorial Assistant at The Hip Hop Museum, Kouadio specializes in bridging contemporary art forms with academic discourse through innovative experiential storytelling techniques and methodologies.
As a guest curator, you focused on a specific pillar of Hip-Hop. Can you share which pillar you worked on, why it resonated with you personally, and how you approached representing it through the artifacts and stories?
I chose to explore MCing, the verbal artistry at Hip-Hop's core. This element spoke to me because it revealed rap's evolution beyond entertainment into a vehicle for complex ideas and social commentary. My background connecting street culture with scholarly analysis made this pillar especially meaningful.
I structured my exhibition around two concepts: First, highlighting the written craft behind the music through personal notebooks and drafts that revealed rappers as serious writers. Seeing Tupac's handwritten revisions alongside historical speeches showed how these artists engaged with literary traditions. Second, examining the visual culture surrounding MCs—how photographs, clothing, and album artwork carried messages beyond sound.
Each piece told a larger story. A worn jacket became evidence of activism; album designs revealed connections to ancient symbolism. Through these objects, I demonstrated how MCs created intellectual bridges, transforming neighborhood stories into universal truths while maintaining authenticity to their origins and communities.
Hip-Hop is often celebrated for its music, but this exhibition highlights it as a broader cultural movement. How did you approach telling the story of Hip-Hop beyond the songs themselves?
I revealed Hip-Hop's depth by treating every element as cultural documentation. I explored how artists built an entire ecosystem of expression. I presented handwritten drafts and personal notebooks as primary sources, showing rappers as thinkers wrestling with social issues. These documents sat beside famous recordings, proving the creative process mattered as much as final products.
Visual elements became equally important. Fashion choices weren't style—they were statements. Promotional photos weren't publicity—they were visual essays. I displayed clothing and imagery as deliberate communications, each carrying coded messages about identity and resistance. I connected contemporary rap to broader traditions, showing how modern artists continued centuries-old practices of oral history and community storytelling. Ancient symbols appeared in modern designs; revolutionary rhetoric echoed in contemporary verses.
My goal was simple: demonstrate that Hip-Hop created its own language—verbal, visual, and material—that shaped how generations understood themselves and challenged their world.
Through this exhibition, what do you hope visitors take away about the power of Hip-Hop as a form of storytelling, resistance, and cultural expression?
I want visitors to leave understanding that Hip-Hop fundamentally rewired how we communicate resistance and build community. When they see these artifacts, I hope they recognize rappers as contemporary philosophers who made complex social theories accessible through rhythm and verse.
My goal is for people to grasp how artists transformed every available medium into protest. Nothing was passive—everything carried intention and message.
I want the visitors to appreciate the genius of making intellectual concepts street-accessible without diluting their power. These artists took university-level ideas and made them resonate in neighborhoods, creating dialogue between academia and everyday experience.
Most importantly, I hope visitors understand Hip-Hop's role in historical continuity—how it carries forward centuries of Black creative resistance while inventing entirely new forms. This isn't just music history; it's evidence of how marginalized communities create parallel systems of knowledge, beauty, and power that reshape mainstream culture.
MOPOP’s Youth Advisory Board (YAB) brings teen voices into the museum’s programming through collaboration with local musicians, artists, community groups, and more. “It’s important to engage YAB members in opportunities to contribute to exhibitions like Beats + Rhymes because it gives youth the chance to participate in MOPOP’s efforts to tell stories about pop culture,” shares Jordan Leonard, MOPOP’s Senior Producer of Artist Development Programs. “These opportunities inspire youth to see themselves as producers of pop culture and future arts leaders.” Nine YAB members collaborated on this special exhibition, and we spoke with student and long-time member Ren Latendresse about the process.
What was the most surprising or unexpected part of guest curating this exhibition?
I would say that the most surprising part of the guest curating experience was how much time it took to write and edit the words going into our portion of the exhibition. Also, just being able to see the progression of our part of the exhibition — from ideas that we shot back and forth to becoming a physical part of the exhibition.
Beats + Rhymes emphasizes shared curatorial authority and community voices. How did working with the MOPOP team and other curators influence the way you shaped the exhibition?
Working with all of these amazing people influenced the way I shaped the exhibition, because not only was I able to put my own voice into what we were working on, but I was also able to build on and uplift the ideas of those who worked on the exhibition with me and who may have had a bit more skill in writing or more experience doing this sort of work.
Through this exhibition, what do you hope visitors take away about the power of Hip-Hop as a form of storytelling, resistance, and cultural expression?
I hope that visitors to the exhibition will take away that Hip-Hop isn’t only an important and influential music genre, but also that it was heavily influenced by the cultural and social movements of its time, which shaped how the music was created and for what purpose.
