Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz lend their art collection to the Brooklyn Museum

Singer Alicia Keys and her husband Kasseem Dean, aka Swizz Beatz, turn out to be quite the art collectors. Their interest mainly goes out to black artists, including works by Nina Chanel Abney, Derrick Adams, Gordon Parks and Amy Sherald. The couple is now lending part of their personal collection to the Brooklyn Museum, which resulted in a new exhibition called Giants, on display until 7 July 2024.

“We want you to feel connected and emotional and really discover artists that maybe you know of, maybe you don’t know of, maybe you’re seeing for the first time. We want you to see the giants on whose shoulders we stand”, Alicia Keys explained.

Contrary to what you might expect from an exhibition, Giants isn’t a sequence of white, cold museum rooms where it feels like you need to already be quite the art-connaisseur in order to enjoy the works on display. Instead, the exhibition is set up as a series of cosy living rooms with comfortable seating areas and relaxing music, which was chosen by Swizz Beatz himself.

“We always like to have visitors feel that our shows are accessible to them. Maybe it’s not this work. Maybe you don’t love this work, and that’s fine. But whatever work you love, you can live with it. We invite you to sit. We invite you to look”, curator Kimberli Gant told NPR.

Even though Giants has quite a large number of works on display, the exhibition doesn’t cover the entirety of Keys and Dean’s art collection, which includes over 1,000 pieces. Their art treasure has been growing over the past 20 years and started because the couple found that not enough people of colour were collecting works of art by artists of colour, Keys explained to Cultured magazine in 2018. Their collection includes works from famous black artists but also from emerging names that haven’t yet acquired the fame they might one day do.

“Giants refers to several aspects of the Dean Collection: the renown of legendary artists, the impact of canon-expanding contemporary artists, and the monumental works by such creators as Derrick Adams, Arthur Jafa, and Meleko Mokgosi. Immense pieces—including the largest ever by Mokgosi—are paired with standouts such as Parks’s seminal photographs, Wiley’s revolutionary portraits, and Esther Mahlangu’s globe-bridging canvases. The term also evokes the strength of the bonds between the Deans and the artists they support, and among the artists themselves. Along with examining these links and legacies, the exhibition will encourage ‘giant conversations’ inspired by the works on view—critiquing society and celebrating Blacknes”, the Brooklyn Museum explains.