sampling, 2023

The Greene Space presents a public mural in collaboration with the Children’s Museum of the Arts and the New York Public Library to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop. The large-scale collage, for which printing and installation costs have been funded by lead sponsor Hudson Square Properties, was created by the students of the local City-As-School, one of the oldest alternative public high schools in the country.

Utilizing imagery from the NYPL Picture Collection, the collaborative series of murals entitled “sampling,” explores visual and musical sampling –– a tradition shared by both Hip-Hop music and the visual art form of collage. Like sampling a track in a song, the students of City-As-School took pre-existing media and transformed it into their own collective artwork. The artists incorporated self-portraits alongside cut-out photos of the early pioneers of Hip-Hop like Notorious BIG, RUN DMC, Slick Rick, and TLC.

The partnership represents an unprecedented union of cultural institutions dedicated to fostering creativity, education, and artistic expression among young people. Working alongside these organizations, CMA provided local students with access to the Picture Collection, letting them tap into a unique set of visual assets for their artwork in celebration of Hip-Hop. The NYPL Picture Collection, created in 1915, is a resource for artists, illustrators, students, and educators with over 1.5 million circulating images clipped from books and magazines across 12,000 subject headings.

An homage to the 50th anniversary of Hip-Hop, the series of murals takes a quintessential element of the genre as its driving creative force. Born out of a back-to-school party in the Bronx in 1973, the genre of Hip-Hop uses a form of auditory collage called sampling as its foundation. With an ethos of uplifting the silenced and challenging the status quo, the music genre is centered around the experiences of working class youth, rooted in the idea that art can be a form of protest.

The mural will be on view in the windows of The Greene Space on Varick Street and Charlton Street from July to August.

You can learn about The Greene Space here. Check out our upcoming events here, and find out how to collaborate with us through our artist residency program here.