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Kurtis Blow Promotional Portrait
Publisher
Mercury Records
Publisher
PolyGram Records, Inc.
Signer
Kurtis Blow
Subject
Kurtis Blow
Visual image
Kurtis Blow
Date1980
Mediumpaper (fiber product)
DimensionsOverall (HWD): 10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.32 cm)
Credit LineMoPOP permanent collection
Object number1999.221.3
Text EntriesKurtis Blow (Kurtis Walker, b. 1959) became the first rapper to be signed by a major record label, Mercury Records in 1979. His first single “Christmas Rappin’” sold more than 400,000 copies and became a holiday staple. With his second release, “The Breaks”, in 1980, Blow earned the first gold record ever for a Rap artist and launched the careers of The Fat Boys and Run-DMC. He went on to accomplish many other firsts including being the first Rap artist to star in a national television commercial (Sprite, 1986), making the first Rap video (“Basketball,” 1984), and acting in a soap opera (One Life to Live, 1991). He is also the founder of the International Hip-Hop Museum.
CopyrightThis work is issued under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License. For more information, go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
On View
Not on view
Mercury Records
Date: 1980
Medium: gold; acrylic; wood
Object number: 1999.221.5
Mercury Records
Date: c. 1992
Medium: cotton
Object number: 1998.827.122
Kurtis Blow
Date: c. 1986
Medium: chromogenic color prints
Object number: 1999.733.259
Profile Records, Inc.
Date: c. 1985
Medium: paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1998.854.19
Profile Records, Inc.
Date: c. 1990
Medium: paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1998.827.422
Next Plateau Records Inc.
Date: c.1989
Medium: paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1998.827.425
Jive Records
Date: c.1992
Medium: paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1998.827.506
Loud Records/RCA
Date: c.1995
Medium: paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1998.827.519
Kurtis Blow
Date: c. 1980
Medium: ink; paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1999.221.4
Kurtis Blow
Date: 1988
Medium: ink; paper (fiber product)
Object number: 1998.802.27
Lovebug Starski
Date: c. 1983
Medium: ink; paper (fiber product)
Object number: 2002.396.70
Kurtis Blow
Date: c. 1985
Medium: leather
Object number: 1999.221.1,.2