Trinity International Hip Hop Festival Marks 20 Years with ‘Living Declarations’ Exhibit

For 20 years, the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival has brought together artists, students, and community members from Hartford and across the globe. A new photo exhibit opening in conjunction with this year’s festival celebrates its history and legacy.

This year’s festival, titled “Voices of Freedom: Resistance, Justice, and Revolution,” will be held April 9-12 at locations both on and off campus. Highlights will include a lecture, a student producer showcase, dance battles, and much more. A new permanent mural by international graffiti artists at Hartford’s Parkville Market aims to leave a lasting mark on the city.

The 2026 festival will present two internationally acclaimed co-headliners: Da Odd Couple, the DJ duo of Rob Swift and Mista Sinista, and B-Boy Tim Andria, a breaking champion from France. All events are free and open to the public. See the full schedule here.

The milestone anniversary is being marked by Living Declarations: Photo Exhibit of Global Hip Hop in the City of Hartford, which invites viewers to reflect on the festival’s past while imagining its future. It will be displayed April 5-19, both on campus in The Cave (Mather Hall, lower level) and at Parkville Market (1400 Park Street, second floor), and also during the festival on Saturday, April 11, at 1390@Parkville (1390 Park Street).

The exhibition was created by Seth M. Markle, associate professor of history at Trinity and faculty advisor to the Trinity Chapter of The Temple of Hip Hop—a student-run organization founded in 2006 to promote hip hop culture—and Jasmin Agosto ’10, a community partner with Sageseeker Productions.

The creation of Living Declarations was a collaborative and archival effort, Markle said. Drawing from decades of documentation, including early materials from founding organizers and contributions from photographers and videographers, Markle compiled and organized a large collection of images. Agosto curated these into 15 collages, each using photographs from different years. The collages are intentionally nonlinear, blending photographs from different years to create what Agosto describes as a “collapse of time.”

The exhibition was made possible in part by a grant from Connecticut Humanities through its “America 250” initiative. “The photo exhibition gives a different element of pause and reflection in between these really exciting aspects of the festival,” Markle said.

The project serves as both a celebration of and a critical reflection on the past two decades of global hip hop culture. The title, Living Declarations, gestures toward the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Markle said that hip hop—a culture rooted in marginalized communities—both carries forward and critiques the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, emphasizing inclusion and resistance.

Rather than treating the Declaration of Independence as static or completed, Agosto described it as ongoing. “It’s not the end of something… but rather that we are currently imagining and making it happen,” she said. “I think that beautifully lines up with this imagination of what a country could be… and of what hip hop allows us to imagine our communities to be, and to practice them.”

Agosto highlighted the importance of youth within this framework. Drawing from her work with the festival’s “Youth for Change” initiative, she emphasized the parallels between young people’s roles in both the American Revolution and contemporary hip hop culture. “Young people’s voices were incredibly important in the American Revolution… [They] had to carry the message forward,” she said. “I see those direct ties and how we are working with young folks, how we are incorporating them within the festival, and how there’s these incredible intergenerational conversations that are happening.”

Trinity students use their own voices to play a central role in organizing the festival each year. Student organizers are part of the Trinity Chapter of The Temple of Hip Hop, of which Agosto was a member when she attended Trinity. From booking artists to coordinating logistics, students spend months preparing for the four-day event.

“We couldn’t do this without the Hartford hip hop community,” Markle added. “And we couldn’t do this without the students saying, every year, ‘We want to take part in a year-long process.’”

For Agosto, the festival’s impact is deeply personal. As a high school student in Hartford, attending the first festival ultimately influenced her decision to enroll at Trinity. “It showed me this was a place I could belong,” she said. Agosto also noted that many alumni of the Trinity Chapter of The Temple of Hip Hop go on to careers in the arts, education, and community organizing, reflecting the festival’s impact beyond campus.

For Markle, that impact extends past the exhibition itself. “The festival also has been this really important bridge between Trinity and Hartford,” he said. “If you talk to the Hartford hip hop community, they have positive things to say about Trinity because [of the] the festival, so it has allowed students to connect with the Hartford community.”

Both organizers hope that Living Declarations will leave viewers with a sense of awe and reflection. Agosto wants audiences to feel “overwhelmed—with joy, curiosity, and imagination.”

For the full schedule and event details, visit the festival’s Instagram page @trinityhiphop, or access the complete schedule online.