"'Who knows,' Ralph Ellison had asked two decades before hip-hop, 'but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.'" – Chuck D, Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap

Celebrating over 40 years of art making, Cey Adams, former graffiti artist and founding Creative Director of Def Jam Recordings, is back in the Twin Cities, and this time he’s brought recent work with him for a show at the NewStudio Gallery in St. Paul. 

Adams said that as a tagger in New York City in the early 1980s he was “fascinated by graf writing and saw it as calligraphy – I loved the way it looked.” In those days, taggers called themselves writers, gathering at a “writer’s bench” to discuss their designs and tagging activity in the city. As writers, the goal was to make their name known throughout all boroughs of New York City by tagging their personal logo on every train line. In Adams' book, DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop, filmmaker and artist Sacha Jenkins recalls this time, saying: “Writers were the loudest quiet cats you’d ever meet. Quiet in the sense that they were working without microphones. Loud in the sense that that wanted their monikers to have the same brand-name recognition – or volume – that Coca-Cola did.” Graf writers achieved recognition by using a particular graphic style unique to them, a style that became immediately recognizable as their own, which, at that time meant recognizable to an intended audience. In DEFinition Adams writes, “If it doesn’t speak to you, that’s because it’s not trying to.”

Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet, politician, and cultural theorist who was the first president of Senegal said, “Where orality reigns, art constitutes the writing which allows us to read the metaphysics it transcribes.” Graf writing, hip-hop, rap, and breakdancing created a visual and rhythmic language in a lower frequency that transcribe and translate ideas and feeling into recognizable form, a code readable by those immersed in the culture. 

Adams’s writing and transcription of identity evolved as he dove more fully into graphic design as the Creative Director for Def Jam Recordings, transcribing and creating visual identities for not only the groups signed by the label, but for the audiences buying the albums – a generative cultural feedback loop that, conceptually repeating the logo transcription of graf writing, reinforced attachment to a particular range of ideas and feeling, to certain cultural codes. 

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: MPLSART.com

Cey Adams: ETCetera, 40 Years of Art and Design is on view at NewStudio Gallery through Saturday, August 12, 2022. Gallery hours: Monday - Friday, 10am - 4pm, or by appointment. For more, visit newstudiogallery.com or follow them on Instagram @newstudiogallery.​