Exhibit highlights decades of hip-hop created in Atlantic Canada
Memphis, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit — these are the cities most people associate with the hip-hop scene.
But Michael McGuire is on a mission to show that hip-hop has made waves in Atlantic Canada for decades. The multi-disciplinary artist, educator and rapper has put together an exhibition, East of East Atlantic Hip-Hop Archive, at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. It runs until Nov. 23.
McGuire, who performs as Hermit of the Woods, started collecting mixtapes, CDs, vinyl and posters from local hip-hop artists back when he was a kid. What started as a passion became an archive of over 2,000 recordings, 400 posters, 850 CDs, 165 cassettes and 280 records.
“I eventually started making my own music and that got me connected to the scene and learning about all the other artists who were working and making things happen,” he said.
He went on to become a professor and has brought local hip-hop to his academic studies.
In his journey to conserve hip-hop in Halifax, McGuire started by asking who was the oldest artist in the scene.
He was told by fellow producers it was a man named Manny Bundy, also known as King Bun.
“King Bun, who way back in the ’80s used to do a kind of rhyming, storytelling,” said McGuire. “Maybe not hip-hop in the way that we think about it now, but certainly a precursor to that.”
McGuire said hip-hop made its way to Halifax from New York through family members recording shows and bringing them over.
“We had something of a pipeline direct from New York giving us really interesting new hip-hop music,” he said.
“But because we are separated and we have to do our own thing, people started making it themselves.”
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One of those people is Seth Glasgow, known artistically as Vadell Gabriel, who is a local musician, DJ and producer.
He said being surrounded by mixtapes and names he grew up listening to is nostalgic.
“We’re all friends. We’re all family,” Glasgow said. “We collaborate, we talk. It’s just great seeing them get some recognition.”
His own name was featured on a timeline McGuire made to map all the different artists in the region.
The East of East Atlantic Hip-Hop Archive is on display at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax until Nov. 23.
In the same gallery, Mark V. Campbell brought another homage to Canadian hip-hop culture, this time about visual art such as graffiti.
His exhibit, Still Tho, is about the perseverance and resilience of artists to express themselves and break the barriers of what can be done.
“There’s lots of boundaries and ways that your art practice could be halted and interrupted. And the phrase still, though, is about, look at these people that have been doing this for 25 and 30 years,” said Campbell.
Campbell is the curator and founder of Northside Hip Hop Archive, a digital collection of hip-hop history and culture in Canada. One of his goals is to connect with people and find more artists.
“We do have artists in Vancouver and from Saskatchewan, but we don’t really have anyone from the East Coast. So having it here was a way for a kind of gesture to the city to be like ‘We want to get down with you, too.'”
