In 1987, Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow, an up-and-coming rapper and actor born in New Jersey and came of age in Los Angeles, worked with Bronx-bred hip-hop DJ and producer Charles “Afrika Islam” Glenn to release an album that is now considered a progenitor of “gangsta rap.”

“Rhyme Pays” was the first of several musical collaborations between Ice-T and Islam. More than 30 years after their most recent one, they’ve joined forces once again to commemorate the culture that brought them together.

“Day One DNA: 50 Years in Hiphop Culture” celebrates the genre’s 50th birthday with an exhibition of more than 300 objects from both artists’ private collections. The extensive multimedia repository is on view from November 3, 2023, to May 21, 2024, at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery, an extension of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.

Ice-T, Islam and Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the Hutchins Center, worked together to mount the exhibition as a way of commemorating hip-hop’s golden birthday and as the second event after the reopening of the Cooper Gallery, which had been closed for two years. They invited award-winning documentary and portrait photographer Laylah Amatullah Barrayn to curate the project.

“Day One DNA” features photographs, tour laminates, sneakers, and other items that represent one of the world’s largest private collections of hip-hop paraphernalia and the evolution of the genre over the last half century. Like Barrayn’s past work, which ranges from early 1990s music and photojournalism to exhibitions in San Francisco, Chicago, and Italy, the exhibit serves as an ode to the nuance of Black culture.

“The Black experience is a broad, dynamic, global, and international experience with many facets,” Barrayn said. “My primary reason for doing the work that I do is not so much in response to the violence that is out there, but to really recognize the beauty of our very global, dynamic Black experience.”

An expert in African diasporic narratives, Barrayn recently published the book “We Are Present: 2020 in Portraits,” featuring images from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests and other events from the year.

For “Day One DNA,” the goal was to tell a story of friendship, partnership, and the evolution of hip-hop. The departure from her regular work made the exhibition a unique yet gratifying challenge for Barrayn.

“I've learned a lot about Ice-T and Islam. They are very driven men [who] are very smart and they are also very creative,” she said. “They like to challenge themselves, and they’re all about collaboration, community, and family. These are characteristics of people who are strong, who are solid, and who make positive contributions to the world.”

 As a Brooklyn-born child of the 1970s who watched hiphop grow up, Barrayn has a deep appreciation for the culture and hopes that exhibition attendees will gain a deeper understanding of where hip-hop came from and how it has evolved in the last 50 years.

“Archiving and preservation is so important,” she said. “I watched the actors and the players in this culture be creative, be driven, and make their mark on the world. What I saw was fearlessness...I’ve always been inspired by that.”

“I want people to be reminded of the evolution of the culture and the art form and how it started—the ‘Day One DNA’ and grassroots efforts that made this culture.”

"Day One DNA: 50 Years in Hiphop Culture" from the private collection of Ice T & DJ Afrika Islam and curated by Laylah Amatullah Barrayn is on view from November 3, 2023, to May 31, 2024 at The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at
Harvard University.