NY State Awards Universal Hip Hop Museum In The Bronx $3.75 Million Grant
Bronx, NY – New York state officials have approved a $3.75 million grant to help build the Universal Hip Hop Museum with the scheduled opening to mark 50 years of the genre, according to cnn.com.
The museum will be located in the Bronx and is the brainchild of local hip hop aficionados. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the $3.75M grant last Thursday (March 12) to the nation’s first museum dedicated to hip-hop.
Hip hop was born in the south section of the New York City borough of the Bronx in the United States in the late 1970s. The dancing, rapping and deejaying elements of hip-hop grew out of the depressed inner-city environment but it has since evolved into a multi-billion dollar part of mainstream global culture.
The initial exhibit tells the early origins of hip hop history and will be replaced every six months with the next stage of the culture’s development. When the museum is complete, the 50,000-square-foot space will feature interactive and immersive exhibits, live shows, film screenings, and seminars.
To quote from CNN:
Now at a temporary location in the Bronx Terminal Market, The Universal Hip Hop Museum is the brainchild of New Yorkers who have been on the hip-hop scene since the very beginning. One of these New Yorkers is executive director Rocky Bucano. Born and raised in the Bronx, Bucano was a DJ as a teenager in the early 1970s.
Bucano describes the 8-year-old museum as an “ambitious, audacious dream.” Bucano’s co-founders include hip-hop legends Kurtis Blow and Grand Wizzard Theodore, who helped pioneer the popular DJ technique known as scratching.
“We knew it was important because the Bronx is where hip-hop started,” Bucano told CNN. “It’s crazy to think of how hip-hop — which has such an influence on pop culture, advertising, politics — doesn’t have a place to call home.”
According to CNN, the founding board of directors includes Ice-T and cultural ambassadors include New York natives LL Cool J, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Grandmaster Flash, Fab Five Freddy, and Nas.
In 2018, the Universal Hip Hop Museum announced that Public Enemy’s Chuck D would serve as the chairman of the museum’s celebrity board.
“Hip-hop is possibly the last remaining DIY genre, and we need to bring it up to speed in its administration. I’ll hopefully be a magnet for others to offer their services and help build the museum into a vital space,” Chuck D said in December 2018. “The museum will be a solid base of recognition of the past. But it will also be involved in hip-hop’s [ongoing] definition, protecting it and making it viable for the future. The celebrity board’s role will be that of a collective with the energy of many helping to propel hip-hop well into the 21st century.”
Thanks to the state funding, the 50,000-square-foot hip-hop museum will have a permanent place to call home in Bronx Point come 2023. The museum’s construction will begin in the summer of 2020.
The museum will showcase all aspects of hip-hop culture — from fashion and breakdancing, as well as the evolution of hip-hop — highlighting artists new and old, from the late ’70s to today.
The museum will also offer workshops, mentorships, and programming to help area youths.
To visit the museum’s site for tickets or to donate, go to https://www.uhhm.org