Cultural and Community Resilience in Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art

By Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa

I’ve attended countless art exhibition openings in Halifax, drawn by their potential to foster community. Yet, these spaces, often claiming to celebrate cultural diversity, feel overwhelmingly white. As a newcomer committed to uplifting Black artistic production, I long to connect with people whose experiences help situate my presence on this land. Instead, I often feel isolated in my desire to see more diverse audiences—until the opening of Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery on September 21, 2024, in Halifax. At the opening, the gallery’s warmth struck me immediately: the sound of laughter and the beat of DJ DTS’s set created a palpable sense of belonging. For the first time since moving to Halifax from Toronto over a year and a half ago, I found myself surrounded by my community, which transformed the event into a celebration of presence and belonging in a space so rarely welcoming of Black people. 

Postcolonial theorist Jenny Sharpe’s concept of the “immaterial archive”—memories and practices that defy traditional modes of preservation in the face of archival erasure—came to mind as I walked into the MSVU Art Gallery. The opening of Still Tho powerfully disrupted systemic barriers in gallery spaces, echoing the exhibition’s embrace of hip hop’s transitory nature. The room seemed alive—the sounds of DJ DTS’s scratching mixed with snippets of conversations, blending into the exhibit as a dynamic, living element. Seeing the works for the first time in such a way, I was struck by the sense that, like the opening, the exhibition presented the ephemerality that has come to characterize hip hop’s aesthetic and the Afro-diasporic experience not as something to struggle against, but as a tool of endurance for diasporic cultural and aesthetic knowledge. 

Curated by Mark V. Campbell—DJ, scholar, curator, and founder of Northside Hip Hop Archive—Still Tho brings together fourteen artists from across Canada to explore hip hop’s ephemeral qualities as a response to histories of displacement and erasure within the Black community. Many artworks in the exhibition address this erasure, highlighting the need for self-determined archives of diasporic cultural production, ancestral knowledge, and daily life. This need for self-determined archives takes shape in the works of EGR and Corey Bulpitt, where the spray can is reimagined as a vessel for preserving diasporic narratives. EGR’s Art on Vintage Spray Cans transforms vintage spray cans into archives of past work, while Bulpitt’s Spray Can Carving blends ancestral Haida carving practices with iconic street art. Seeing both works reimagine the spray can as new cultural artifacts, I couldn’t help but feel giddy as if discovering a beloved childhood toy transformed into something wondrous and new. These works balance the tension between impermanence and preservation, repositioning ephemera as archival objects to form new immaterial archives of cultural production.

Experiencing this exhibition brought me an overwhelming sense of joy and pride, seeing not only Black artistry be celebrated, but also the spirit and community that sustains it. The opening of Still Tho felt so impactful as a disruption of systemic norms within the gallery partly due to the atmosphere of resistance and resilience reflected by the works in the show. Since hip hop was born from a period of socio-economic strife and systemic erasure, the genre’s ethos is rooted in a methodology of survival through creativity. These core values continue to appear in hip hop’s criticality of ongoing dispossession and violence enacted against Black bodies. 

Building on the exhibition’s central themes, many of the works in Still Tho challenge the systemic erasure and impermanence that have long haunted Black cultural production by immortalizing styles that historically resisted preservation and stillness. One example of this practice is a series of five miniature trains that have been “tagged” and encased in clear frames by Eklipz, who pays homage to early graffiti traditions, playfully linking personal expression to histories of urban art. Eklipz’s trains evoke a sense of nostalgia and resistance simultaneously; their polished glass casings seem almost at odds with the gritty, unapologetic vibrancy of the tags etched onto their surfaces. Similarly, Miss Me’s Free Cap, crafted from remnants of wheat-pasted posters, and STARE’s S to the T, a graffiti piece on cement-covered canvas, preserve works often erased by nature or lost to municipal cleanup efforts, effectively disrupting the boundaries between the gallery and the street. In doing so, these works highlight graffiti’s physical fragility while celebrating its resilience as a cultural practice. They present an opportunity to ask what constitutes art and who decides its value, sparking the question: Does enshrining the ephemeral neutralize its rebellious spirit, or does it amplify its resilience?

This dialogue between resilience and resistance continues in works by Mark Stoddart and Eklipz, which draw from hip hop’s tradition of remixing and sampling to recontextualize cultural imagery, exposing enduring systems of oppression. Through this process, they transform art into a vessel for memory and critique, challenging viewers to confront global systems of inequity. Stoddart’s Fight the Power parallels Radio Raheem’s fictional murder in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and the real-life murder of Eric Garner over thirty years later, exposing the persistent realities of police brutality. Meanwhile, Eklipz’s Coltan Kills juxtaposes smart phone advertisements with the violent truth of resource extraction, critiquing capitalism’s exploitation of the Global South. By remixing cultural symbols and historical narratives, these works effectively archive the intangible yet vital sentiments of resistance and survival that originated hip hop as a genre, constructing new meanings while preserving their origins. 

At its core, Still Tho: Aesthetic Survival in Hip Hop’s Visual Art examines the tension between transience and legacy, reminding us that the act of preservation is itself a radical gesture. By exploring hip hop’s visual culture and survival aesthetics, the exhibition—and its vibrant opening event—reveal ephemerality not as a limitation, but as an act of resistance. This impermanence becomes a way of creating cultural memory in defiance of historical erasure, inviting us to ask: How can hip hop and exhibitions like this one inspire new ways of valuing, protecting, and learning from cultural expressions that resist archiving? What might such conversations reveal about the writing of history and our imagined futures? In posing these questions, Still Tho celebrates the resilience of cultural memory amid forces of erasure, showing us that ephemeral art forms within hip hop, like the African diaspora itself, persist and endure—still tho.

Fabiyino Germain-Bajowa (she/her) is a Nigerian-Canadian writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist based in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). Her work engages Afro-diasporic archives of thought and memory inherited through oral history, food traditions, and acts of care. Centring the lived experiences of Black artists, her community-based practice seeks to build networks of knowledge as tools for cultural literacy. She earned her BFA in Criticism and Curatorial Practice from OCAD University and has curated programs such as Tell the Body (Vtape, Toronto), The Suppa Club (with Temple Marucci-Campbell, Toronto), and the upcoming exhibition Down Home at Dalhousie Art Gallery (2025). Currently, she is the TD Fellow Assistant Curator at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.