Ann Arbor Undercommons
Ann Arbor Undercommons is the beginning of an ongoing and iterative initiative to collect, archive, and display the works of the underground Hip Hop scene in Ann Arbor, Michigan from 1993-present (primarily focusing on 1995-2005). This exhibition is the first iteration which focuses on archiving the work of the collective Athletic Mic League and its close collaborators.
In collaboration with: Jamall Bufford, Tres Allen, and Athletic Mic League
Role: Art Direction, Exhibition Design, Installation, Writer, Archivist
There are many reasons these years are important, to start it was the time Athletic Mic League was first formed and most active. It was also a time, considered by many, to be Hip Hop’s golden era. Additionally, it marked a shift in the culture and priorities of a Midwestern college town (Ann Arbor) shortly after the culture wars of the 1990s played out on a national scale in the US. Prior to this moment Ann Arbor was known as the state’s creative, liberal, hippy outpost, largely because of the academic and political haven generated by the University of Michigan. In the next decade Ann Arbor and U-M would struggle with it’s identity and pivot towards hedging its future on sprawling medical and athletic campuses, upscale student dorms, tech startups, venture capital, and neoliberalism. In the process it lost much of its grassroots, creative, and black communities.
This project measures that moment through the lens of black youth navigating these shifts in real time. It tracks the contributions of black youth to a city which often minimizes and makes invisible the presence of its black community. It honors what they were able to create in the face of high school achievement gaps, heavy policing of black bodies, and displacement. The title is in reference to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s 2013 book titled, The Undercommons. This book is used as a framework to contextualize the archive and exhibition in part because of its astute theorization of knowledge and creative production in black communities especially in their adjacencies to academia.
This is a collection displaying artifacts and ephemera generated over a 25 year period by Athletic Mic League including posters, records, CD’s, tapes, video game cartridges, fashion items, equipment, and photographs. These artifacts are accompanied by sound, video, and quotes from The Undercommons. This collection comes out of a necessity to generate a collective memory of significant cultural production in a place that has little connection to its local homegrown artists.
