Tahir Hemphill: Rap Research Lab

Between January 30 and March 18, 2023, the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture (CADVC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) was occupied by Hemphill’s active research laboratory and studio focused on data visualizations of rap culture and history. CADVC operatef as a forum for learning through “Mapper’s Delight,” a middle-school curriculum designed by Hemphill in collaboration with Verizon Innovative Learning. All of these activities will happened in the context of an exhibition of Hemphill’s evolving body of multimedia artwork, including a presentation of his growing series titled “Maximum Distance, Minimum Displacement,” and new interactive works and works-in-progress on view for the first time. Among the new works is “Visualisation of Authority,” a kinetic sculpture illustrating the evolving data of library holdings that were the subject of Hemphill’s 2018 research as the 2018 Harissios Papamarkou Chair in Education at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

“Rap Research Lab” at CADVC also operated as the classroom for Hemphill’s teaching. His Spring 2023 course, “IRC Fellows Topics in Art and Technology,” invited an interdisciplinary group of students to work on translating ideas into new visual and material form through creative technologies. The course was offered in collaboration with the UMBC Image Research Center. Hemphill and his collaborators will mine the Rap Almanac, a vast dataset of rap lyrics that Hemphill has assembled from various archives over the course of many years, to produce new artworks, experiments, and visualizations. The presentation at CADVC evolved as new work was produced.