Album Covers Were Always Portraits, A$AP Ferg Signed His

There is a long pattern in hip hop that treats album covers as canvases. Kanye West turned to Takashi Murakami. Gunna worked with Paper Frank. Drake tapped Kadir Nelson. The record sleeve has never been packaging. It is the visual half of the story, the first line of mythology before the music starts.

A$AP Ferg just took that idea to its most personal place by painting the cover of his album Flip Phone Shorty – Strictly for Da Streetz Vol. 1 himself. No commissions, no art-world cameo. Instead, he made a self-portrait and let it live as the project’s front door. That image became the spark for his solo exhibition CHOSEN, and the moment where the name on the canvas switched from Ferg to Darold Brown.

Hip hop and art have always been joined by the same instinct. Both are tools for self-definition. Both offer a way to turn personal history into shared language. So when an artist paints the front of their own record, it lands as more than rebellion. It reads like authorship at the deepest level. The portrait broke open something for him. It set the emotional logic for both the album and the show.

Painting was never a detour for Ferg. He grew up sketching in a Harlem barbershop. He went to art school before music took over. The loft where CHOSEN took shape made that lineage visible. One room for sound. One room for canvas. The work pulls from the same sources. Family. Loss. Memory. Home. Some pieces are quiet. Others hit like a verse. The brushwork feels like it was done mid-thought.

The larger point is that hip hop has always blurred the line between the studio and the gallery. Album covers have long functioned like portraits, invitations, declarations. When Ferg paints his own cover and hangs the rest beside it, he isn’t reinventing himself. He’s showing that Darold Brown, the painter, never left.