Questlove, Black Thought, Jane Blaze, Benny Boom, Buckshot, Busta Rhymes, DJ Kool Herc, DJ Scratch, Domingo, Easy AD, Fab 5 Freddy, Fat Joe, Hakim Green, Heather B, Kool Keith, Lord Jamar, Tuff Morgan, Rah Diggah, Rakim, Slick Rick, Styles P., Xzibit

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Gordon Parks, A Great Day in Hip-Hop, Harlem, New York, 1998

Gordon Parks, A Great Day in Hip-Hop, Harlem, New York, 1998

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On September 29, 1998, 177 hip hop artists, producers, and influencers gathered at 17 East 126th Street in Harlem to pose for what would become one of the music industry’s most iconic photographs. A Great Day in Hip Hop, first published on the cover of issue no. 7 of XXL magazine, was Gordon Parks’s homage to Art Kane’s 1958 photograph of 57 jazz musicians spilling off the same Harlem brownstone stoop for Esquire magazine. Since the Harlem Renaissance, the neighborhood had been a notable center of the uniquely American sound of jazz. His photograph—commonly referred to as A Great Day in Harlem—ingrained itself in our collective memory, epitomizing the “golden age” of jazz and Harlem.

The 1998 shoot was in fact Parks’s second visit to that iconic brownstone. In 1995, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to photograph 10 of the 12 surviving participants of Art Kane’s photograph Golden Age of Jazz (1958) where they stood nearly 40 years earlier at 17 East 126th Street. In the moving image, the boarded up and roofless shell of the brownstone emphasized the absent musicians who had died.

In 1998, four decades after Kane's original photograph, Gordon Parks visited the same brownstone at 17 East 126th Street for XXL magazine to photograph hip-hop artists, producers, and influencers. A Great Day in Hip-Hop includes 177 of a new genre’s “golden age” overflowing the stoop of number 17 to the two stoops on either side and reclaiming the space for the next generation.

In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the historic Great Day in Hip-Hop, the 2019 Gordon Parks Foundation Awards Dinner and Auction brought together a group of artists who partook in the 1998 photograph: Questlove, Black Thought, Jane Blaze, Benny Boom, Buckshot, Busta Rhymes, DJ Kool Herc, DJ Scratch, Domingo, Easy AD, Fab 5 Freddy, Fat Joe, Hakim Green, Heather B, Kool Keith, Lord Jamar, Tuff Morgan, Rah Diggah, Rakim, Slick Rick, Styles P., Xzibit. To mark the historic occassion, legendary New York photographer Jamel Shabazz—winner of the 2022 Gordon Parks Foundation / Steidl Book Prize and 2018 Honoree—captured the artists on stage, markign that Great Day in 2019.

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Art Kane, A Great Day in Harlem, 1958

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Gordon Parks,  A Great Day in Harlem, Harlem, New York, 1995

Slideshow

Black Thought and Questlove. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.

Black Thought. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.

Questlove. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.

Artists gathered to recreate A Great Day in Hip-Hop, the 1998 photo by Gordon Parks. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.

Artists gathered to recreate A Great Day in Hip-Hop, the 1998 photo by Gordon Parks. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.

Artists gathered to recreate A Great Day in Hip-Hop, the 1998 photo by Gordon Parks. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.

Photograph by Jamel Shabazz, June 4, 2019

Artists gathered to recreate A Great Day in Hip-Hop, the 1998 photo by Gordon Parks. Photograph by Patrick McCmullan.