NEW YORK, NY.- Of the New York museums that would create an exhibition on jewelry associated with hip-hop culture, I would not have imagined the American Museum of Natural History to be one. Yet, “Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry” did open in May in a tiny gallery of their Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals. With 66 objects, it has an astute premise — that precious stones might attract more attention if regarded through the lens of hip-hop, probably the most widely proliferating music movement that the United States has ever produced.

This show might have been organized to absorb the energy around the 50th anniversary of hip-hop’s inception last year or anticipate the Hip Hop Museum’s opening in the Bronx in 2025. More cynically, some might see “Ice Cold” as an act of penance for the museum’s admitted possession and use of the remains of Indigenous and enslaved people, as the museum faces criticism about the legality and the ethics of these acquisitions. Either way, the venture feels successful. I visited the show twice, on a Thursday evening and on a Monday morning, and each time, the gallery was filled with visitors.

The show is beautifully laid out. It’s installed in a small, dark, semicircular gallery, with jewelry in vitrines spotlighted against a black acetate and Plexiglas. The diamonds glint and coruscate as you move across the displays. One could linger, bedazzled and charmed by the bold inventiveness of pieces such as ASAP Rocky’s EXO grenade pendant — its “pin” sets the time — displayed on two disks set inside a locket. However, the exhibition offers more, including the concealed and paradoxical implications of wearing these constellations of bling.

The curators — Vikki Tobak, author of “Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History,” Kevin “Coach K” Lee, a founder of the Quality Control music label, and Karam Gill, director of a documentary on the subject — took the important step of historically situating hip-hop’s ostentatious display of wealth. They refer to an Asante chief in Ghana whose ceremonial dress consisted of copious amounts of gold (although the date of an image referenced turns out to be 2005, which makes the ancestral connection vague).

Shrewdly, the curators also name-check each jeweler (when they are known), so they are properly recognized as collaborators and makers alongside the musical stars, such as Ghostface Killah’s eagle bracelet by Jason Arasheben — a massive 14-karat gold wrist cuff with an eagle alighting onto it. The Notorious B.I.G.’s Jesus necklace, made by Tito Caicedo of Manny’s New York, is another icon. It features the head and neck of a figure in gold whose beard, locks, clothing and crown are festooned with diamonds. In terms of the meaning they convey, these chains do a lot of heavy lifting.

For starters, they indicate membership in a very exclusive club, such as Quality Control’s QC necklace for members of its label, including Migos and Lil Yachty. The Roc-A-Fella pendant — which notoriously can’t be bought but has to be bestowed — was made for the eponymous label founded by Jay-Z, Damon Dash and Kareem Burke. And after releasing their 1986 song “My Adidas,” each Run-DMC member received a solid-gold, sneaker-shaped pendant by Adidas upon signing an endorsement deal.

Roxanne Shanté of the Juice Crew, and one of the few women rappers to achieve stardom in the early days of hip-hop, has her Juice Crew ring shown here. “Having the Juice Crew ring is like a royalty stance, and you had to represent certain things in the community to wear it,” she says in the show’s text. “It stands for so much: community, loyalty and greatness.”

This jewelry is also used by men in courting rituals. Nelly, who wears a diamond Nefertiti piece in one of the exhibition photos, sings in “Ride Wit Me” (2000): “And if shorty wanna pop, we popping the Crist’ / Shorty wanna see the ice, then I ice the wrist.” Both parties benefit here: The man, bestowing Cristal Champagne, is recognized as a lavish provider; the woman as a valued object deserving of expensive expenditure. What’s unrecognized is just how restrictive these roles can be. Insightfully, though, queer experience is not ignored in the exhibition, which includes jeweler David Tamargo’s grill set commissioned by Lil Nas X in 2021 to celebrate the artist’s unabashedly homoerotic single, “Montero (Call Me By Your Name).”

These pieces also serve as a kind of memorial. On display is the Capital Steez necklace commissioned by Joey Badass in honor of his friend Capital Steez, who died in 2012 at 19 years old. Badass became a founding member of the Progressive Era or Pro Era collective along with Steez and other rappers. The necklace features the late rapper’s likeness, in gold, on a diamond-studded Gucci link chain. Pouring one out for a homie who has passed on is a well-known ritual, but imprinting his image on a pendant moves him up into the pantheon of public attention.

But more important, the jewelry also stands for the ambition to be elite, to have the means to spend money extravagantly on personal adornment. And this desire usually outpaces the actual assets that aspirational rappers have at their disposal.

On his 2004 debut album, “The College Dropout,” Kanye West, lately Ye, rapped about buying $25,000 jewelry before owning a house, then adding: “I got a couple past-due bills, I won’t get specific / I got a problem with spendin’ before I get it / We all self-conscious, I’m just the first to admit it.” Ye, one of the most emotionally transparent (and most unstable) voices in hip-hop, articulates its fake-it-till-you-make-it ethos.

This is a critique often leveled at hip-hop culture: that lavish self-presentation — not only jewelry but also clothing and cars — says what you buy, as opposed to what you produce, is the measure of your value; that hip-hop glorifies a lifestyle that is fake or irresponsible and, either way, out of reach for most people on this planet. There is some truth to all of this. But this is not hip-hop’s cross to bear alone. The fault lies in American popular culture at large.

Throughout the 1980s, during hip-hop’s commercial rise, the TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” flogged the cliched notion that “making it” consisted of having exclusive wristwatches, automobiles, boats and real estate. In hip-hop culture, rappers say it with their chests, out loud, without shame, in the streets. The trappings are worn for public view, rather than obscured by shell companies.

Still, this shamelessness permits callous and spiteful parts of the culture to feel entitled. “Run the Jewels,” released in 2013 by the eponymous rap duo, encouraged violently stealing jewelry from anyone who seems privileged: “So when we say, ‘Run the jewels’ / Just run ’em, baby, please don’t delay me / She clutched the pearls, said, ‘What in the world?’ / And, ‘I won’t give up shit!’ / I put the pistol on that poodle and I shot that bitch.”

So, although “Ice Cold” sings from the hip-hop songbook in the key of celebration, it avoids the messier bits of the culture: the misogyny, the persistent though lessening homophobia, the endorsement of physical violence.

I wish hip-hop culture as it is presented here was more aware of and willing to acknowledge these contradictions and brave enough to try resolve them. But this show doesn’t aim to do this. It doesn’t feature the weird parts of hip-hop, underground acts, “conscious” or feminist rap, or hip-hop produced outside the United States. Still, Latin artists are present, including Fat Joe and Big Pun. As are some women rappers, including MC Lyte and Queen Latifah.

The show does take seriously the less expensive signs of Black Liberation that act as adornment, such as DJ Kool Herc’s leather medallion on which he drew his self-portrait and graffiti tag. Kool Herc is one of the pioneers of hip-hop from the early 1970s, so his inclusion is a nod to the historical tradition. Within that tradition is Public Enemy, arguably the most overtly political group of the early 1990s. The show offers clock pendants (adopted on a dare) worn by their hype man, Flavor Flav, and the pendant designed by Chuck D, a founder of the group, that features a Black man caught in the crosshairs of a rifle sight — meant to symbolize the plight of all Black men in the United States.

But there is an internal contradiction in the show and within hip-hop itself: The people whom the culture purports to represent are, to an extent, ignored in favor of the celebrities who hold the mic and whose voices boom loudest. These are the 1%.

Yet, the orientation toward the street and the desire to show the neighborhood that you have arrived financially impels innovation. T Pain’s “Big Ass Chain” necklace weighs more than 10 pounds and has almost 200 carats of diamonds. According to the caption, he commissioned this piece on a dare from a person he does not even remember.

Tyler, the Creator’s bellhop necklace — a bejeweled golden figure carrying a suitcase in each hand — is my favorite piece, not because, as the text conveys, it “incorporates 186 carats in diamonds and 60 carats in sapphire, as well as more than 23,000 handset stones.” Rather, it alludes to the history of Black people laboring in service jobs, such as hotel bellhops, because — on the basis of their race alone — they were denied employment commensurate with their skills, abilities and ambitions. It’s a symbol of Tyler’s success and a nod to his ancestors who could not radiate their gifts so publicly.

I know something about the impulse to celebrate one’s achievements with jewelry. I got my first black diamond ring a few years ago and had to overcome significant anxiety to do it. I grew up in a working-class home that convinced me that extravagance was permissible only after achieving a firmly middle-class life. I don’t know that I have. But after the protracted struggle to attain my doctorate, I felt I deserved it. It wasn’t until the third visit to a midtown Manhattan jeweler that I noticed pictures on the walls of various hip-hop luminaries. What connects us is the years we spent working in obscurity, and our willingness to invest in an object that pays gleaming tribute to the work we’ve done.

During a recent public forum, Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of “The 1619 Project,” discussed the importance of Black people presenting themselves in ways that read as authentic. She said, “One of the things I love about Black people is our sense of style and flair.” She argues that in the struggle to achieve success, “What is important is if you make it, make it intact.”

“Ice Cold,” despite its limitations, emphasizes the aspect of hip-hop that genuinely nourishes its audiences: recognizing and acknowledging that we deserve more than simply being intact; we have every right to shine.

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‘Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry’

Through Jan. 5 at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan; amnh.org.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.