The Rap History of Art is a project that draws upon Kevan Cooke's first-class honours degree in Art History, combining it with a long-standing love of Rap and Hip-Hop culture, and access to the latest technology in music production. These interests intertwine in a series of releases, each based upon one of the great works in the canon of art.

For example, debut single The Night Watch, released in December 2024, relocates Rembrandt's famous painting to the streets of Detroit in a dense lyrical rap. Similarly, the 2025 single The School of Athens, likens the gathering of great philosophers in Raphael's painting to the gathering of pioneering rap artists in the Compton of the Eighties and Nineties, while attempting to capture the vibe of the period. The Starry Night takes a drug-fuelled trip through Van Gogh's swirling sky, passing the mic against an early-nineties breakbeat backing.

In the exuberant pop-rap of David, our rapper compares her own chiselled form to the perceived perfection of Michelangelo's scupture. The psychedelically tinged trap of Birth of Venus sees our rapper displaying that same confidence as she emerges, adored, onto the stage like Venus emerging from the foam in Botticelli's painting. Meanwhile Self Portrait at the Spinnet adopts a more serious tone against a simple piano backing, as our protagonist draws parallels between the difficulties for Lavinia Fontana pursuing an artistic career in the male-dominated art world of the Renaissance, with the battles faced by a female rap artist in the modern day.

Edvard Munch's The Scream is translated into an existential howl of rage-rap, while we have a romantic soul-rap double-bill of sorts in the pairing of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa with Johannes Vermeer's Girl With A Pearl Earring, while art of the twentieth century is embraced in Fountain, with Marcel Duchamp's shocking upheaval of the art world likened to changes brought about in rap music a century later by the advent of Soundcloud, TikTok and A.I. Dollar Sign is a bouncing celebration of Any Warhol's Pop Art, and The Two Fridas uses Frida Kahlo's painting as a route into discussing the duality and internal conflict of an American performer with Latin roots.