Picture being surrounded by all the greats: Tupac, Biggie, Kendrick, Nipsey and 24 other top-billed wordsmiths of hip-hop. We know them for their music. We rank them according to it. But when’s the last time we really reflected on the humans behind the hits? Las Vegas artist Stephanie Amon’s Faces of Hip-Hop at Sahara West Library allows us to do just that.
The exhibit marks one of several showcases the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District has introduced as a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, and visually-speaking, it’s one of the best.
A portrait artist since 2020, Amon gathered a list of more than 20 rappers from different eras for her first solo exhibition, creating hyperrealistic oil canvas paintings of each that spoke to their inner characters, personalities and even swag levels.
“I would look for images with a lot of expression, or anything really flashy,” she says. “You’d see artists from Atlanta and they would have grills. Anything with a lot of detail, I went towards that.”
For an artist who took a single painting class at UNLV as she pursued a degree in nursing, the 30-year-old Amon is either an incredibly fast learner or a prodigy. She captures distinguishing features of these emcees that you might miss on a mixtape cover. The feathering of Tupac Shakur’s long eyelashes. The twinkle in Tyler, the Creator’s expressive, playful eyes. The gold-plated grin of Andre 3000 as he hides his face with his hands.
And then there’s all the ice. Amon’s portraits of rappers like Tory Lanez and Gunna drip with it, gleaming with a brilliance that’s hard to replicate with oil paints, but Amon’s an artist with bold hues, rugged brush strokes and delicate accents.
To see these musicians, stripped of their titles, staring back with the naked emotion that makes their music so iconic, has a profound effect. They, too, are people. They, too, have trauma, and they, too, have joy. It’s all written there on their faces.
Amon was born in Long Beach, California and spent some time living in Okinawa, Japan as a “military brat” before she moved to Vegas in 2002. “Japan had a big influence on my creativity,” says Amon, who loved the color-drenched styles of anime.
But Amon didn’t get serious about art until she escaped a toxic relationship that hindered her creativity. “When I left my ex, everything just started to fall into place,” she says. “It didn’t feel like I was forcing anything. It was organic. I put all my emotions into it.”
It took about a day to create each painting (“If I take weeks, I’m already uninterested,” she says), but Amon actually had to redo pieces for Faces of Hip-Hop because NFL quarterback Cam Newton bought a majority of the collection the first time. “Being able to finally share it with everyone publicly was definitely a milestone,” she says.
Her work has been shown in group shows at Downtown’s Priscilla Fowler Gallery and at Trap Music Museum in Atlanta, among other places.
The artist plans to make a lookbook out of her Faces of Hip-Hop pieces and has already begun a women in R&B series. As a relatively new painter, Amon says she’s still nailing down the softer notes of painting women, but she’s excited to showcase more artists in such a detailed way.
“It’s definitely helped me appreciate art as a whole. Just the difficulty and the struggle of being an artist,” she says. “It doesn’t just have to be visual art, it applies to singers, rappers and stuff like that. You have to be in it to understand fully.”
Faces of Hip-Hop Through November 18; Monday-Thursday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Friday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sahara West Library, thelibrarydistrict.org.
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