In the Cradle of Hip-Hop, a South Bronx Gallery Bridges a Gap

NEW YORK — For the past 11 years, Free Richardson has run The Compound, his creative advertising business, from a compact space off Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx, where he works on campaigns for Timberland, ESPN and EA Sports. Part agency, part clubhouse, The Compound refers to the physical footprint, a bunkerlike space where Richardson hosts clients, professional athletes and hip-hop artists who come to use its recording booth, kibitz or admire Richardson’s collection of KAWS figurines, hip-hop ephemera and NBA memorabilia.

But the name also signifies Richardson’s governing ethos: that combining creative disciplines usually yields something interesting.

“Everyone who would come over would say, ‘Yo, this is like your own art museum,'” Richardson said. “So I said, OK. It was always in the back of my head but it was like, when is the time right to do it?”

The time became right this summer, when real estate investment company Somerset Partners offered Richardson a lease on a stout, single-story white brick space at the foot of the Third Avenue Bridge in Mott Haven.

Richardson, who was born in the Bronx and grew up between Queens and Philadelphia, built it out in a matter of weeks into a polished white cube gallery, also called The Compound.

With it, Richardson aims to correct what he perceives as certain imbalances in the gallery system. His goal is to present artists from marginalized backgrounds and highlight media given short shrift by blue-chip galleries. He also hopes to restore context to art forms he sees as having been exploited, like graffiti. “I feel like what I’m doing is different from the standard gallery format,” he said. “No galleries, to me, have accepted hip-hop to be a part of their DNA.”

He estimates somewhere around 600 people attended the opening reception in September, a figure which was most likely bolstered by the news that his partner in the gallery is Yasiin Bey — the rapper and activist formerly known as Mos Def.

Bey, a Brooklyn native whose solo projects and collaborative work with Talib Kweli as Black Star made him a beloved figure among both mainstream hip-hop fans and underground aficionados, has in recent years become one of the genre’s more enigmatic entities. He announced his retirement from music two years ago (it’s been intermittent), and effectively expatriated (he was living in South Africa for a time, and now lives in Paris). His retreat from public life — he doesn’t keep a cellphone and avoids speaking with news media — has, as these things tend to, stoked the mystique around him.

That Bey would be returning to New York to help open an art gallery in the South Bronx might seem unexpected, but he and Richardson have been working together since they met over two decades ago, when Richardson created the influential AND1 Mixtape Tour, a giddy collision of street ball, streetwear and hip-hop that featured early tracks from Bey, then a recent Rawkus Records signee.

“He was the first person at the original Compound, when it was literally just four walls and a floor,” Richardson recalled. “I showed him the space and told him my vision and he said, ‘You gotta do it.'”

Bey will help curate exhibitions and special programming. He already has one show to his credit, the gallery’s soft opening, in August, of work by Christina Paik, a photographer who has produced imagery for Nike and Virgil Abloh’s Off-White line of streetwear.

Richardson’s and Bey’s inaugural show is a survey of portraiture by photographer Jonathan Mannion, titled “I Got a Gallery.” “I Got a Show.” Mannion has been something of hip-hop’s house photographer since the ‘90s, when he shot the cover of Jay-Z’s debut studio album, “Reasonable Doubt,” and his imagery is considered to be some of the most indelible of the genre.

The body of work on view (the gallery is open daily by appointment) spans the breadth of hip-hop’s compact but fertile history, from Run-DMC, Rakim and Big Daddy Kane, to the LOX, Method Man and Aaliyah, to current stars like Drake, Nicki Minaj and Kendrick Lamar. The geography is appropriate: the Bronx is understood as the cradle of hip-hop, and the gallery is a short ride from 1520 Sedgwick Ave., the apartment building that DJ Kool Herc has referred to as “the Bethlehem of hip-hop culture.” Accordingly, the show leans toward New York’s homegrown icons: a double exposure of Method Man in Polo Sport made in 1997; a wall-size print of the Notorious B.I.G. holding an audience in thrall in 1995; a steely DMX holding back a pair of pitbulls from the same year; a black-and-white Polaroid of Slick Rick holding a bedazzled pendant over his damaged eye. The focus is a certain period of New York rap primacy, and the way its legacy continues to vibrate.

An oversize image of Big Pun, made just a few blocks away in 1999, his face framed beatifically through a car sunroof, fills the gallery’s street-facing window. On a recent visit, Richardson said a frequent associate of Pun, the rapper Fat Joe, a Bronx native also represented in the show, had just stopped by.

The Compound’s building retains the shape of its past life as an auto body repair. There are still plenty of operating shops flanking the surrounding blocks, but they’re being joined by newer espresso bars, restaurants and clothing boutiques. And there are new residential developments and luxury condominiums, too. Somerset Partners had been underway at 2401 Third Ave., a residential building at the former J.L. Mott Iron Works site on the Harlem River waterfront, which they sold to Brookfield Properties last month.

Richardson hinted that the developers had noticed his connections with musicians and athletes, and saw an opportunity to bolster their investment’s cultural bona fides. “Oh yeah, he was watching,” Richardson said, referring to Keith Rubenstein, one of Somerset’s founders. Invoking the Nas record, he added, “It ain’t hard to tell.” Rubenstein called it “a fair deal for everybody,” but declined to provide specifics. “Free and I have been friends for a couple of years, and I was interested in him creating something unique and exciting,” he said.

Somerset, which is developing other projects in the neighborhood, drew ire in 2015 after it threw a lavish one-night art show and party in a warehouse that has since been razed on the 2401 site, and erected a billboard that referred to the area as “the Piano District.” But Richardson sees the immediate area resisting gentrification.

“There’s a difference between forcing people to move out and tearing buildings down, and creating something where there’s nothing,” he said. “There are businesses opening up with minority owners. To me, that makes it a whole different conversation.”

New York’s gallery scene is centralized in Chelsea, but the South Bronx has its own presence. A few blocks from The Compound is Wallworks, at 39 Bruckner Blvd., which has exhibited work from graffiti progenitors Dondi and Futura since 2014, when John Matos, the graffiti star known as CRASH, helped open the place. Bronx Art Space (at 305 E. 140th St.) and 6base (728 E. 136th St.) are also nearby. These spaces have a forebear in Fashion Moda, which from the late ‘70s to the early ‘90s functioned in the South Bronx as community space as much as gallery, giving early credence to artists like Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf and David Wojnarowicz.

For his part, Richardson has said he hopes to find the next big name to transcend the boundary of street art and fine art.

The Compound isn’t necessarily a hip-hop gallery, and that name might not be strictly tethered to hip-hop. Upcoming shows include solo exhibitions of figurative painting by King Saladeen and work by Ron English as well as a sound installation curated by Bey. But hip-hop culture tints its worldview.

“The purpose of the gallery is to say all art is equal,” Richardson said. “But we are in the borough that created hip-hop, which is the biggest art form in the world, so it’s always an extending arm. It’s always present.”

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“I Got a Gallery.” “I Got a Show.”

Through Oct. 12 at The Compound, 2242 Third Ave., Bronx; 347-270-3125, thecmpd.com. Open daily by appointment.