Inside the Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys collection at the Brooklyn Museum

It would only make sense to hear Marvin Gaye’s creamy croon as you walk into “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 more than 100 works by emerging and established black artists.

Upon entering the first gallery, viewers are encouraged “to be our biggest: to think our biggest thoughts, to express ourselves in the greatest way possible,” according to the exhibition text. While this advice might seem flippant in the midst of global cataclysm, there’s little doubt that Dean and Keys, two consummate songwriters and collectors, have used this philosophy to catapult themselves, both professionally and as collectors.

“Giants,” which opens on February 10, is the first time the couple has seen this large part of their collection in one space. Set in the Great Hall of the Brooklyn Museum, the show features giants such as Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas and Arthur Jafa; Jafa is huge Big Wheel I (2018) hangs heavy, not unlike the uncertainty of this election year in the US. points of black life.

A few galleries, silky sounds serenade visitors from a speaker set inside a space filled with plush brown sofas, a quadrant-shaped coffee table and a rug that looks like a wooden floor. Instead of a 60-inch TV, there are 14 ornate golden circular frames that grace a sky-blue wall. Within each frame reside Jamaican landscapes that transport you beyond the living room. It’s a fantasy within a dream. The fantasy comes from Barkley L. Hendricks—best known for his portraits—who fell in love with the island’s cinematic escapes when he first visited in the 1980s. The dream is provided by Dean: a living room where viewers can sit as if in their homes and admire the impressive art on their walls.

This simulated experience for viewers became a core tenet of the Dean collection: the importance of black people being stewards and “collecting, protecting, [and] respect” Black art and black culture. This experience plants a seed, making the distant dream of one day being an art collector a much closer reality; it helps to understand that black and brown people who work every day can 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. Living rooms make space, literally, for viewers to engage with the work in a very intimate way, offering a comfort, warmth and ease that are not synonymous with museum spaces. Moments like these ensure the continued prosperity of black art.

Dean began acquiring art as many collectors do. At 18, she was looking for art to decorate her newly purchased home. As he poked around the galleries, he was stunned by the high prices. “I couldn’t understand why the works were so expensive on the wall,” Dean said in a video inside the exhibit. “I was like $50,000 for what? $100,000 for what?” A gallerist soon recognized his passion and put him on the path to becoming a collector; his first acquisition was a photograph of Ansel Adams. Along the way, Dean honed his eye and honed his intuition. “My strategy is to collect from the heart,” he said. Keys echoes this sentiment; for her, collecting is guttural.

Later, during a tour of the Kehinde Wiley 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 expanded on living artists, learning that while they are central to the art ecosystem, they are often marginalized. Dean began to center and support them through ideal platforms such as the No Commission art fair/exhibition in 2017. “No commission was started because people built these worlds around artists and galleries win, fairs win, collectors win and the artists.” they have to find their own way home”, he reflected. “What if we did something that was really about the artists and they kept 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 get involved and learn about the artists and their works. Keys and Dean apply the same unifying universalities of music to art. Inevitably, their role as collectors evolved into that of administrators and advocates; they have created a collection that is mission-based and purpose-driven.

Dean and Keys also introduced “Dean’s Choice,” a way for collectors who sell works on the secondary market, through an auction house or galleries, to direct a percentage of the proceeds to the artist. Currently, there are no widespread stipulations or guidelines suggesting that artists should make money from the resale values ​​of their work. “’Dean’s Choice’ puts the onus on collectors; it gives people the choice to do the right thing,” Dean said. “Right now, if we sold a work, the artist would get 0%.” The auction house lets the seller decide how much money, if any, it must go to the artist. “There’s a certain ethics,” Keys continued. “It would be really wonderful to start rethinking how you do any of this.”

Although there are several works by Wiley in the show, including a dazzling pair of portraits of Dean and Keys, in addition to the wide and the size of a wall. Woman bitten by a snake (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 Battle for Area X (2015) depicts a searing image of a brooding protester with a lit Molotov cocktail in hand, amidst a blaze of fire and fury. This work easily represents any of the protest images that were born as a result of the murders of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Through loose figuration, the centralized figure of the black body symbolizes the many peoples of the Global South who find themselves at the end of the rapidly fraying rope of colonialism. Dr. King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Lagarrigue completely captures Dr. King’s sentiment.

Qualeasha Wood’s genesis (2021) is a woven tapestry work that appears in another space in the living room. She appropriates Catholic iconography, centering and replicating herself, a black, queer, tattooed, tattooed woman, as a celestial entity adorned with a halo of gold. The work evokes the Sistine Chapel, but this Renaissance image is less Michelangelo and more Beyoncé.

It is the epic visual narrative of Temptations Mokgosi Bread, butter and power (2018), which stretches across two long walls, giving viewers plenty to delight in. A native of Botswana, Mokgosi paints African-centric scenes in a myriad of locations and spaces: a person getting their hair done, children posing for a photo, and a group of esteemed professionals in uniform taking a photo. Mokgosi’s version of melanin are cinnamons, caramels and coffees; his sun-glazed subjects shine. Between the different scenes, Mokgosi inserts monochromatic white panels with white text that support the images and address colonialism, nationalism, class, democracy and gender inequality. Works like these, which highlight the everydayness of African life, are a serious attempt to close the colonial gulf between African Americans and Africans.

Other works not to be missed are Nick Cave’s metal button Sound suit (2016); and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Triptych Stone arabesque (2018), part of another salon landscape, in which a dancer captivates, and is what black people are not usually: carefree. Also noteworthy is a section dedicated to Gordon Parks’ iconic photographs, which serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go.