The Most Unexpected Cultural Collectible of the Year is a LEGO Bamboo Earring
How Syreeta Gates is turning Black cultural memory into collectible art, one LEGO at a time.
LEGO bricks and bamboo earrings aren’t things you usually see together. That’s exactly why artist, producer and archivist Syreeta Gates paired them.
And with Salt-N-Pepa, the all-female rap group who helped catapult bamboo and door-knocker earrings from neighborhood staple to global trend in the ‘80s, being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this week, and the passing of Marcyliena Morgan, the founder of Harvard University’s Hip-Hop archive, it feels like the right moment to talk about what culture we celebrate, what we overlook, and who gets credit.
Elements of Black culture, and hip-hop culture in particular, have long been dismissed as “unfashionable” or “lowbrow” until they’re repackaged or validated by predominantly white spaces. Gates built Most Incredible Studio to shift that dynamic — and her LEGO bamboo earrings are the first project and conversation starter.
Photography JAMEL SHABAZZ
Most Incredible Studio is the New York City-based independent creative house she founded to design cultural collectibles using the plastic building blocks as a medium. This isn’t an official LEGO® set; (LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which doesn’t sponsor or endorse this project.) Syreeta works with artists, institutions, and estates to translate memory, legacy, and lived experience into something tangible. Each piece is designed to be held, played with, displayed, and eventually passed down, a way to preserve cultural narratives that are too often ignored.
The idea didn’t start as a business. It began with stillness. Gates, an adult woman building LEGO Architecture sets to quiet her mind, calls it “therapy through construction.” Building became connection too, especially back when nephew, DJ, was five-years-old. (He’s now in college at an HBCU studying engineering.) “It reminded me how stories move across generations, how a build can hold memory, imagination, and lineage at once.”
But after completing the entire Architecture Collection, she felt a tug. “There were worlds I wanted to see reflected in brick form that didn’t exist,” she says. “There were cultural touchpoints that looked like us — and they weren’t there.”
So she built what was missing.
Photography JOSHUA TAYLOR / THE SIR TAYLOR, LLC
Why Bamboo Earrings?
That philosophy comes alive in BAMBOO: a 303-brick wearable reimagining of the iconic bamboo earring. For Gates, the decision was intuitive. “The bamboo means family,” she says. “Jamaica Avenue, Fulton Street, Fordham Road — all the women who raised me.” These retail corridors across Queens, Brooklyn, and The Bronx weren’t just shopping streets; they were style incubators, cultural classrooms, and runways long before Instagram.
Honoring that lineage meant partnering with Dr. Yaba Blay, a scholar, cultural theorist, and author known for her work on colorism, identity, and the politics of Black beauty, as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence. “Yaba is my big sister,” Gates says. “She told me, ‘You can’t do this without me,’ and she was right.” Blay’s lived experience, and the receipts to match, shaped everything from the earrings’ silhouette to the storytelling around it. “Everything had to honor the women who wore them first.”
Syreeta isn’t the only one reimagining the bamboo earring’s place in culture. This summer, Boston-based sculptor Ja’Hari Ortega debuted Big Hoops to Fill, two monumental fiberglass bamboo earrings transformed into public swings, honoring the women of color who made the style iconic and creating space for play, rest, and visibility in the center of downtown Boston.
Video REGGIE PERRY JR
Building a Cultural Artifact
Transforming this signature shape and style into a structured, yet personal and expressive LEGO form required intention — and a village. Gates partnered with independent LEGO artists, visual designers, 3D artists, and two photographers whose work embodies the project’s ethos: Jamel Shabazz, the legendary Brooklyn documentarian known for capturing Black life, joy, and style with precision and tenderness; and Joshua Taylor, a contemporary photographer whose eye bridges past and present.
They shot the piece at Adornment & Theory, a Puerto Rican-owned jewelry store in Chicago, nodding to the multiethnic communities that have carried the bamboo tradition for decades.
The release includes an assembly guide, booklet, photo editorial, and a “Professional Black Girl” card. “The guide isn’t a manual; it’s an invitation,” Gates says. “You’re literally building memory with your hands.”
Play, Community, Legacy
For Gates, play is liberation. “Play unlocks freedom. It lets us imagine without permission,” she says. BAMBOO is intentionally multigenerational. “A grandmother, mother, and child can all connect to it differently. One sees nostalgia. One sees design. One sees possibility.”
Looking ahead as she plans her next LEGO project?, Gates envisions Most Incredible Studio as both archive and playground — “the house that made memory tangible.”
“If someone picks up one of our pieces decades from now and feels both pride and possibility,” she says, “then we’ve done our job.”
Photography JOSHUA TAYLOR / THE SIR TAYLOR, LLC
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