Allison Eicher
The Madison crew includes (clockwise from bottom left): Caleb Bell, Jonathan Chang, Mariam Coker, Ricardo Cortez de la Cruz II and Janae Hu.
Local college students are leaving their mark on the history of hip-hop.
But not in the way you might think.
Instead of rocking a mic onstage or sitting behind the mixing board in a studio, students from UW-Madison and Madison College are teaming up to design the Universal Hip-Hop Museum, which is scheduled to open in the Bronx borough of New York City in 2018.
“[The project is about] showcasing hip-hop history and its culture and paying homage to the pioneers who helped build the genre to what it is today,” says Ricardo Cortez de la Cruz II, a UW English major who’s joined the design team through the university’s First Wave hip-hop program.
Allison Eicher, an architectural technology student at Madison College, sees the project as a chance to show “how hip-hop changed people’s lives [and what it] means to different people.”
The students were recruited for the project by Willie Ney, executive director of the UW’s Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives (which houses First Wave), who was asked to join the museum’s advisory board by hip-hop pioneer Kurtis Blow when he visited here last semester. Ney then tapped his longtime friend and Madison College architecture professor Bob Corbett, who then brought on “the hip-hop architect” Mike Ford, another professor at Madison College.
“Hip-hop is the most listened to genre of music in the world, and the world will be looking at what we produce,” says Ford.
Hand sketches of exterior plaza concepts.
The museum will include exhibits on the origins of hip-hop, its founders, the impact of the nearly 40-year-old genre worldwide and the many elements that make up the culture, including deejaying, graffiti and breakdancing. It will also serve as a space for live events.
Ford, Ney, Corbett and the team of students recently returned from a late-April brainstorming workshop in New York — which they called a “design cypher” — where they worked with hip-hop legends like the Sugarhill Gang, Roxanne Shante, Kurtis Blow and Soul Sonic Force to sketch out building designs and turn them into 3D models. A few high-schoolers participated, but the Madison students were the only college-aged people involved.
The museum design cypher in New York was different from the process used for other architectural projects, says Ford. “During the cypher, it was live history being told to us,” he says, adding that “the artists want this museum built before they die — they don’t want their story interpreted by anyone else.” Among the ideas contributed by students were a “walk of fame” leading up to the museum, a sneaker and clothing/fashion gallery, a subway car for the graffiti section and an exhibit on the women of hip-hop.
Next, the students will combine the many different sketches and exhibit ideas from the design cypher into one master blueprint. That will be presented to the museum’s board to be used to create a 3D layout of the museum using new virtual reality technology known as Google Cardboard. Ford hopes to have the virtual reality model done in about a month.
After that comes the fundraising aspect of the project, which is no small feat. Universal Hip-Hop Museum board chairman Rocky Bucano says the project is looking to raise $20 million to $40 million to transform the old, unused Bronx Borough Courthouse into the museum.
But it’s worth every dollar, he says: “This is not just for the people who came from hip-hop and created the culture — it’s for all the people who love and enjoy the culture around the world. This museum is for them — a place for them to come and see the history of hip-hop in a way that no other museum could display, manage and preserve it.”
