Inside Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys’s Collection at the Brooklyn Museum

It would only make sense to hear Marvin Gaye’s creamy crooning as you enter “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.” The Brooklyn Museum’s latest exhibition, featuring the family art collection of music titans Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and Alicia Keys, curated by Kimberli Gant, features over 100 works by emerging and established Black artists.

Upon entering the first gallery, viewers are encouraged “to be our most giant selves: to think our most giant thoughts, express ourselves in the biggest way possible,” according to the exhibition text. While this counsel could appear glib amid global cataclysm, there is little doubt that Dean and Keys, two accomplished composers and collectors, have used this philosophy to catapult themselves, both professionally and as collectors.

“Giants,” which opens February 10th, is the first time the couple has seen this much of their collection in one space. Set in the Brooklyn Museum’s Great Hall, the show features juggernauts like Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, and Arthur Jafa; Jafa’s massive Big Wheel I (2018) hangs heavy, not unlike the uncertainty of this election year in the U.S. It is some of the less familiar, popular work that exhibits the breadth and depth of the Dean collection, which spans decades and countries, and is rife with rich vantage points of Black life.

A few galleries in, silky sounds serenade visitors from a speaker placed inside a space filled with plush tan couches, a quadrant-shaped coffee table, and a rug that resembles wood flooring. In lieu of a 60-inch TV, there are 14 ornate circular golden frames, embellishing a sky-blue wall. Within each frame resides Jamaican landscapes that transport you beyond the living room. It’s a fantasy inside of a dream. The fantasy is provided by Barkley L. Hendricks—better known for his portraits—who fell in love with the island’s cinematic escapes when he began visiting in the 1980s. The dream is provided by Dean: a living room where viewers can sit as if in their homes and admire the stunning art on their walls.

This simulated experience for viewers has become a core tenet of the Dean collection—the importance of Black people being stewards, and to “collect, protect, [and] respect” Black art and Black culture. This experience plants a seed, making the far-off dream of one day being an art collector a much closer reality; it assists in actualizing that everyday hardworking Black and Brown folks could and should buy and collect art that represents them and reflects their experiences. This clever curation, inviting visitors into art-filled living rooms, is woven throughout the exhibition. The living rooms make space, quite literally, for viewers to engage with the work very intimately, offering a comfortability, warmth, and ease that is not synonymous with museum spaces. Moments like these ensure the continued prosperity of Black art.

Dean started acquiring art like so many collectors do. At the age of 18, he was looking for art to decorate his newly purchased home. As he moseyed about galleries, he was flabbergasted by the steep price points. “I couldn’t understand why the works were so expensive on the wall,” Dean said in a video within the exhibition. “I was like $50,000 for what? $100,000 for what?” A gallery owner soon recognized his passion and put him on a path to become a collector; his first acquisition was an Ansel Adams photograph. Along the way, Dean honed his eye, and tuned his intuition. “My strategy is collecting from the heart,” he said. Keys echoes this sentiment—for her, collecting is guttural.

Later, during a walkthrough of Kehinde Wiley’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015 with the artist himself, Dean was crushed to learn that most of Wiley’s collectors were not people of color. This is where his journey took a turn. He zoomed in on living artists, learning that though they are central to the art ecosystem, they are often marginalized. Dean began centering and supporting them through masterminding platforms like the exhibition/art fair No Commission in 2017. “No Commission was started because people would build these worlds around the artists and the galleries win, the fairs win, the collectors win, and the artists have to find their own way home,” he pondered. “What if we did something that was really about the artists and they kept a 100% of the sales? That was the birth of No Commission.”

No Commission is a series of large-scale, global exhibitions, where artists keep 100% of their profits (gallerists usually get 50% of sales). The show also serves as an entry point for art neophytes to engage and learn about artists and their works. Keys and Dean apply the same unifying universalities of music to art. Inevitably, their role as collectors has evolved into that of stewards and advocates; they’ve built a collection that is mission-based and purpose-driven.

Dean and Keys have also introduced “Dean’s Choice”—a way for collectors selling work on the secondary market, through an auction house or gallery, to direct a percentage of the profits to the artist. Currently, there are no widespread stipulations or guidelines that suggest artists should make money on the resale values of their work. “‘Dean’s Choice’ gives the responsibility to the collectors; it makes people have a choice to do the right thing,” Dean said. “Right now, if we were to sell a work, the artist would get 0%.” The auction house leaves it up to the seller to decide how much money, if any at all, should go to the artist. “There are certain ethics,” Keys continued. “It would be really wonderful to start to rethink how some of this is done.”

Though there are multiple works by Wiley in the show—including a dazzling pair of portraits of Dean and Keys, plus the sweeping, wall-sized Femme piquée par un serpent (2008)—some of the most striking works in the exhibition are by artists whose works are not yet widely celebrated in the art world, but should be.

Jerome Lagarrigue’s Battle for Area X (2015) depicts a searing image of a melanated protester with a lit Molotov cocktail in hand, amid a blaze of fire and fury. This work easily represents any of the protest imagery that was born as a result of the murders of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Through loose figuration, the centralized Black body figure symbolizes many peoples of the Global South who are at the end of colonialism’s rapidly fraying rope. Dr. King said, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Lagarrigue captures Dr. King’s sentiment completely.

Qualeasha Wood’s Genesis (2021) is a woven tapestry work featured in another living room space. She appropriates Catholic iconography, centering and replicating herself, a queer, femme, tattooed, Black woman, as a celestial entity embellished with a gold halo. The work evokes the Sistine Chapel—but this Renaissance imagery is less Michelangelo and more Beyoncé.

It is Meleko Mokgosi’s epic visual narrative Bread, Butter, and Power (2018), sprawling across two long walls, that gives viewers much to feast on. Mokgosi, a native of Botswana, paints scenes centered on African people in a myriad of places and spaces: a person getting their hair done, children posing for a picture, and a group of esteemed uniformed professionals having their photo taken. Mokgosi’s version of melanin are cinnamons, caramels, and coffees; his sun-glazed subjects gleam. Amid the various scenes, Mokgosi inserts monochromatic white panels with white text that support the visuals and address colonialism, nationalism, class, democracy, and gender inequity. Works like these, highlighting the everydayness of African life, are an earnest attempt at closing the colonial chasm between African Americans and Africans.

Other works not to be missed include Nick Cave’s metallic button Soundsuit (2016); and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s triptych Stone Arabesque (2018), part of another living room landscape, in which a dancer captivates, and is what Black people don’t often get to be: carefree. Notable, too, is a section dedicated to Gordon Parks’s iconic photographs, serving as a reminder of how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.