The Universal Hip Hop Museum is fundraising crazy to meet its $300 million goal to open in the next few years.
According to a press release, the UHHM will benefit from an innovative gesture from Hip-Hop Heads (nft.HipHop), a fin-tech company focused on NFTs founded by The Source co-founder Ed Young.
This donation will come from the sale of several NFTs from the art from the iconic illustrator André LeRoy Davis and might yield some big dollars for the institution.
The marketplace will go live at noon ET on Saturday, June 19, 2021, at nft.hiphop and run for 36 days, with one of each Hip-Hop Head NFTs, based on Davis’ art auctioned off each day.
André LeRoy Davis became famous for his Hip-Hop centric “The Last Word” caricatures featured at the end of each issue of The Source magazine during its Golden years.
His artist profile images have been sold for “big bank” in the past, with auction houses like Sotheby’s selling images of Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs from 1997 for anywhere from $8,000 to $12,000 or the late Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor for close to $15,000.
This project that will benefit the UHHM, the first inclusive and extensive museum to honor Hip-Hop in its entirety, is called “103 Hip Hop Heads First Editions.”
The collection features 103 NFT creations with 47 editions in each series. Each of the 103 series features an animated portrait of a famous figure from the culture. The avatars that represent this limited-edition series will feature 47 acts selected from the 47 years of Hip-Hop Art.
The release states, “The animation loops at a rate of ~47.8 seconds to pinpoint the time of creation in the Hip Hop Era. The animation background code is generated by the most significant numbers in Hip Hop history with the sine waves and animation frame rates dependent upon these numbers creating the plasma-type flow illustrating the passage of the Hip Hop Era through these years.”
One very special component to these NFTs is that featured artists will be able to curate the experience with the “whale” that purchases the art.
In addition to launching the NFT, Woods, Davis, and the UHHM board and development team are open to working with legacy artists to establish their own NFTs, for the purpose of building the financial portfolio of their estates.
