...but I was cool is presented in collaboration with Planet Hip Hop 3 produced by the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Co-curated by artist Jerry Gant and Edwin Ramoran, director of the Longwood Arts Project, the contemporary arts center of the Bronx Council on the Arts, the exhibition is a parallel visual arts presentation which features the work of three African American artists-Dread Scott, Robert A. Pruitt, and Jerry Gant-and casts a more critical and analytical eye on Hip Hop culture. Artists Scott, Pruitt, and Gant will respond to historian Orlando Patterson’s assertion, in a May 2006 Op Ed piece in The New York Times, that the “cool factor” accounts, at least in part, for “the sorry state of young black men” in America today.