Hip Hop Preservation

On December 8, 2023, Bernadette Price, Sean Price’s wife, posted on Instagram that they had taken down the Sean Price mural, on Bergen Street & Kingston Avenue in Brooklyn, a day before they promised they would. That was sad to see happen. I was lucky enough to had been out there to see and capture photographs of this mural a few months after it went up in 2015 as well as a few months before it was taken down.

This is just one instance of this happening that I’ve noticed over the past couple of years. There was a Tupac mural in Oakland that was destroyed when a portion of a build was demolished a couple of years ago, as well as a Pam The Funkstress mural that was taken down a few months ago, also here in Oakland; there was also the Princess Leia/Carrie Fisher mural that only lived for about six months before the building was demolished.

Early in 2023, I had an idea to start documenting these Hip Hop related murals in the city after seeing the Pam The Funkstress mural taken down, just for my own personal remembrance. So I went out to capture the Mac Dre mural that I knew existed and felt may not last much longer. But when I found out about the Sean Price mural, it made my personal preservation of these pieces a little more important; for myself, for the artists who created them, but especially for Hip Hop.

With that, I’m presenting to you my Hip Hop Preservation collection of photographs. A collection that I will build over time as I travel to places other than home. This is something that I would love to be a coffee table book in the future, but this may be a very long-term project which will involve me researching murals that exist, looking out for people planning to paint mural, as well as collecting information for the public about mural that I may need to document.

If there are any murals that you know of, anywhere in the United States, please feel free to send me an email to let me know where they can be located and I will try my best to get to them to photograph them before they are removed. All contributors to this will be credited in this project if they choose to.