To celebrate 50 years of Hip Hop, UB will host a conversation between visual artist Eric Haze and writer & activist Bakari Kitwana, a 2023-24 Distinguished Visiting Scholar. Both have been deeply immersed in hip hop culture throughout their lives, and this conversation will focus on when they first became immersed into the elements of MCing, B-Boying, DJing, and graffiti. They will also discuss how both have engaged with hip hop through their respective mediums.

Born and bred in New York City, Eric Haze has contributed to the worlds of graffiti, contemporary art, and graphic design for over four decades. HAZE’s formative years were spent as a founding member of the influential New York City graffiti collective The Soul Artists, with whom he first exhibited work in 1974. HAZE went on to exhibit paintings and drawings alongside close friends such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 1980s. After shifting his focus from galleries to the applied arts in the mid ’80s, HAZE soon emerged as the premier graphic designer of the exploding hip-hop movement.

Bakari Kitwana is the Executive Director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fourteen years has conducted over 150 townhall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. He is the collaborating writer for pioneering hip-hop artist Rakim’s memoir Sweat The Technique: Revelations on Creativity From The Lyrical Genius (Amistad, 2019) and the 2019-2020 Nasir Jones HipHop Fellow at the W.E.B. Dubois Research Institute / Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine. Support is provided by UB Art Galleries and Center for the Arts.

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