Each month, Brick by Brick speaks to someone involved with building The Hip Hop Museum, which will open in late 2025.

This month, we spoke with Jerad Schomer, Director at the theatre design studio Charcoal Blue. Read on as Jerad talks about designing The Hip Hop Museum’s theater space, his extensive background in theater design, and what he wants those visiting The Museum’s theater to walk away with from their experience. 

Adam Aziz: Can you briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your role at Charcoal Blue?

Jerad Schomer: I’m Jerad Schomer, a Director for Charcoal Blue based out of New York City. We are a global consultancy firm specializing in the design, management and project management for cultural and event experience spaces of all kinds worldwide. We have offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Bristol and Melbourne, Australia.

I specialize in the theater and acoustics side of our practice. I primarily focus on cultural projects, theaters, music halls. 

AA: Can you tell me what you and your team are specifically doing for The Hip Hop Museum?

JS: We are the theater design consultants for The Museum. The Museum’s exhibition space, which contains all the artifacts and installations, will physically surround the central area of The Museum, which houses a flexible theater. The theater will be a performance space where The Hip Hop Museum can host artist events in a small, intimate atmosphere. It can host talks with filmmakers, breaking performances, and even master classes with an engineer, DJ, or rapper.

The theater will also be a revenue source for The Museum itself, so it could host regular concert series, outside events, and fundraisers. We’re building flexibility into the space to allow for a variety of events and activations.

AA: Given that The Hip Hop Museum wants to tell the story of Hip Hop as a whole, including where it began and its future, how do you take that into account when you’re designing a space that needs to encapsulate Hip Hop history as a whole?

JS: Fascinating question. We’ve been thinking about how to approach the identity of Hip Hop through the theater’s design. One of the ways we’re talking about doing that, working with the architects on the project, is to use the walls of the theater to have images emblazoned on the walls that are images of Hip Hop history and highlighting some of the iconic artists that put Hip Hop on the map. But those expressions will be done in an abstract way. There’s a common way of expressing imagery using perforated metal panels. The pattern of those perforations creates an image on the surface of the metal panels, and it’s only there if you’re looking at it the right way or in the right light. It’s a way of revealing some magic that’s there on the walls that isn’t always there and comes and goes. 

The theater will be able to bring Hip Hop’s past and legacy into a modern performance space and have that legacy inform what’s happening on stage.

AA: Two-part question: Do you connect with The Hip Hop Museum in any personal way? And two, what did you think of this project when it first came to you?

JS: My musical taste is broad. I grew up in Kansas, and I listened to mostly Rock and Pop music. As far as Hip Hop goes, I got into the early years through MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice – these were the first artists that made it to the Midwest. Going away to college and meeting people who were into NWA and Sugarhill Gang, you get exposed to a different side of Hip Hop that I didn’t really know was there. I’ve been in New York for nearly 18 years, and I discovered much more of the Hip Hop I love after moving here.

I was really excited when this project came alive. There aren’t many cultural projects. Having a Museum and theater dedicated to presenting this one art form that speaks to so many people is a great design exercise. What does a theater for Hip Hop look like, and what does it do?  How do people experience it?  We’ve never done a project like that before. I’ve worked in various theaters – concert halls, orchestras, and marionette theaters. Those are very specific art forms that have to be presented in very specific ways. 

AA: Is there anything that has surprised you so far in the design process of The Museum?

JS: When we started the project, the theater was called a black box theater. In theater design, a black box theater is kind of a nothing space. It’s a flexible space where you can configure seating in any way. It doesn’t have a character; it’s usually dark and industrial, with exposed steel to which you can attach things. 

Over the course of the early stages of the design, we went with Rocky Bucano and Brett Volker from The Museum and visited several theater spaces. We took them to traditional black box theater spaces, highly finished theater spaces, and we took them to many theaters with a lot of architectural elements and natural light coming in. The things they reacted to were not the black box theater spaces. They were the theaters with a lot of character, shape, form, and a welcoming feel. Since then, the design has gone in a different direction. I would no longer call it a black box theater. It’s a theater with a lot of texture and character to it. A theater where if someone takes a picture of a performance and sees the background, you’ll know where the performance was.

AA: When The Museum opens, what do you want people to take away from seeing a performance or visiting the theater?

JS: I hope every person who sees a major artist perform in this space comes away thinking wow, I’ve never been that close to this artist before. That’s what we are going for here – a space where people can really connect and turn off the world. No theater seat will be more than fifty feet away from the stage. This theater is going to create some very special experiences for those visiting The Museum.

Read more interviews on The Hip Hop Museum!