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Reopening in ‘26, a museum of hip-hop history
By Freddrell Green
As a native of the Boogie Down Bronx, Miles Marshall Lewis said he’s steeped in hip-hop music and culture. He knows how and why it was born and about its lingering impact after more than a half-century of international acclaim.
“I saw hip-hop begin from outside my window,” said Lewis, an author and cultural critic. “Before ‘Rapper’s Delight’ was even released, I was seeing graffiti on the walls and deejays in the parks.”
His love of hip-hop, including the art that developed alongside the music, drove his 30-year career covering the genre as a music journalist. Those lived experiences have him shuttling between his current home in Harlem and the Bronx, where he’s charged with helping the forthcoming museum tell the genre’s story.
“I’ve always been, essentially, a historian of this culture,” Lewis said. “It’s always sort of been a goal of mine to create an archive that can be delved into, that explains the culture from the perspective of someone who was born of it.”
Scheduled to open in 2026, the Bronx museum won’t be the first to explore key aspects of hip-hop. Miami has the 4,100 square-foot Art of Hip Hop Museum, exhibiting graffiti, photography, album covers, fine art and other visual arts linked to the music.
Washington D.C. has the National Hip-Hop Museum, which, at 1,440 square feet, also doubles as a cannabis dispensary.
With more than 55,000 square feet of space, the Bronx facility will be the most expansive institute dedicated to preserving hip-hop archives and telling hip-hop’s story. Microsoft, YouTube, Chase and the Hip-Hop Education Center are among its partners.
Kurtis Blow, Grandmaster Melle Mel, Grandwizzard Theodore, Joe Conzo Jr and others were among the celebrities who supported Rocky Bucano, the museum’s founder and CEO, from the outset.
“I don’t think they have anywhere near the backing that we do from hip-hop practitioners and the money people,” Lewis said.
The Hip-Hop Museum’s glass windows will display murals by artists spanning generations. Lyrics will be written on some walls. Different galleries will explore different aspects of hip-hop such as deejaying, emceeing, breakdancing and graffiti.
All of those are part of what is a rebranding of the museum, which originally opened in 2015 as The Universal Hip-Hop Museum. The reopening of the new museum has been delayed. Previously, reopenings were set for 2024 and 2025.
Bronx native Ian Chamberlin cherishes hip-hop’s Bronx origins, its legacy and its future. The museum will place the South Bronx in a more positive light, given longtime perceptions of how rough, crime-ridden and poor that community was as hip-hop was being born back in the 1970s.
“It shows you that a flower can grow in the crack of concrete,” Chamberlin said. “I feel like the flower is the music and the concrete is the area around it.”
At the same time, Chamberlin doesn’t want the museum to shy away from telling the story of stars like Jay-Z, who was born in Brooklyn’s Marcy public housing project. With his claim to fame being tied to drugs and violence, Chamberlin believes that celebrity is a testament to how, despite one’s upbringing, a person can succeed.
“It’s not really the best thing to do, but sometimes you have to do things you don’t really want to do to get things you want,” he said.
Having watched hip-hop evolve, Lewis challenges the younger generation to use the museum as a guide, learning from hip-hop’s past so that they can continue to celebrate.
“You don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you came from,” he said. “There’s so much information readily available that didn’t exist when I was younger … It’s much easier to educate yourself than it was for me.”