June 30, 2024Singer Alicia Keys and producer-rapper Swizz Beatz (real name Kasseem Dean) are giants in the music industry. The Deans also have a giant art collection that includes works by giants of the art world. Several of those pieces are so gigantic they can’t fit on the walls of their three residences in New York, New Jersey and California.
That’s OK. The couple knew some of their paintings and assemblages would be too big to display at home, but they commissioned the works anyway, because they wanted to give the artists a chance to experiment at scales they’d never tried before. You see, the Deans aim to champion living visual artists and especially those from the African diaspora.
Their outsize artworks include Botswana-born Meleko Mokgosi’s epic 21-panel narrative suite Bread, Butter, and Power, from 2018; Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald’s 2022 diptych of soaring dirt bikers, Deliverance, each painting measuring 9 by 10 feet; and Ebony G. Patterson’s 2016 room-size installation, complete with pink carpeting, polka-dot wallpaper, toys strewn about and dozens of fabric orbs. The pieces end up in storage, in various museum exhibitions and in the Dean Collection’s “No Commission” pop-up projects during art-world events like Art Basel Miami.
Luckily for the Deans, and for us, the Brooklyn Museum has enough wall space to show their large-scale works, which are on view there now through July 7 in the exhibition “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.”
For those who can’t make it to Brooklyn, there’s also a vibrant new coffee-table book of the same name, just released by Phaidon. The GIANTS BOOK includes a lengthy interview with the Deans conducted by the Brooklyn Museum’s curator of contemporary and modern art, Kimberli Gant, from which we learn that in the early 2000s, Swizz Beatz began collecting pieces by such big-name nonliving artists as Ansel Adams, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
By 2015, the couple, who’d married five years earlier, had decided to become more active collectors, getting to know and supporting the creators behind the works they acquired, starting with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Kehinde Wiley.
“We were always chasing the Warhols, the Mirós, the Chagalls, all these artists that were put in front of us. Kehinde Wiley wasn’t being put in front of us,” Swizz Beatz recalls in the book. “So our strategy was to collect living artists as much as possible. Because those artists could use our support now, today.”
In the interview, they liken the Dean Collection to a “family” and note that they allow artists to borrow their works back for shows and retrospectives.
Giants puts the spotlight on the Black and Brown artists represented in the highly diverse Dean Collection, most of whom are alive, from the civil rights era through today. There are portraits that emphasize creative ways to depict darker skin, like the 1960s and ’70s color-saturated photographs of Kwame Brathwaite and the charcoal, pastel and pencil drawings of Toyin Ojih Odutola.
Then there are the photographs by Gordon Parks, Malick Sidibé, Jamel Shabazz, Hassan Hajjaj and Deana Lawson, which capture in one still frame the lives and times of their sitters, whether they’re farm workers in the Jim Crow South, breakdancers in New York City, siblings in Soweto or henna artists in Marrakech.
Wiley, Mokgosi, Henry Taylor and Mickalene Thomas thoughtfully capture the moment with paint, while Titus Kaphar, Radcliffe Bailey, Qualeasha Wood and Barkley L. Hendricks look to history in crafting their powerful narratives using a variety of mediums.
The Deans clearly enjoy figurative art, but the collection includes a handful of abstract works as well. Even these pieces contain deeper narratives. Esther Mahlangu’s bold geometric canvases, for instance, are based on the clothing and jewelry of her South African Ndebele culture.
For You shouldn’t be the prisoner of your own ideas (Lewitt), 2017, Hank Willis Thomas sewed together old green-and-white-striped prison uniforms in an X pattern based on the conceptual artworks of Sol Lewitt to make a statement about political prisoners. And the yellow, green, red and black swirls in Nick Cave’s Tondo, 2018, blend the brain scans of kids from neighborhoods traumatized by gun violence with radar maps of disastrous weather events.
Although the title Giants is an intentionally open-ended referent, a section of the book is dedicated to the humongous artworks mentioned earlier. One of them is Derrick Adams’s 25-foot-long collage Floater 74, 2018, a celebration, the artist says in the book, of “Black Joy” and the “multifaceted nature of living as Black people,” depicting a dozen folks swimming and lounging on inflatables shaped like a donut, a pizza slice, flamingos and a black swan.
Despite its incredible length, Floater 74 is just the right size to connect the living and dining areas of the Deans’ modernist mansion in California, whose warm-hued interiors were designed by Kelly Behun. In the colossal combined space, which Keys calls the “family room,” Adams’s collage spans from the far end of a custom dining table surrounded by eight vintage Afra and Tobia Scarpa Africa chairs all the way to a tan Kravet-upholstered Todd Merrill Studio sectional sofa, itself massive.
The room also contains Jordan Casteel’s portrait painting Fallou, 2018, and a 2016 Nick Cave “Soundsuit,” both of which are in Giants. Many other works displayed in the exhibition and the book appear elsewhere in the home. The Deans even have Brathwaite photographs overlooking their Ferraris in the garage.
Wherever they are in the house — or the museum or the book, for that matter —the artworks have a palpable presence, a feeling of personality, which is something the Deans look for in their acquisitions.
“We want people to feel welcomed. We want people to see themselves. We want people to take in the beauty of what’s there,” Keys says in the book. “We want you to see the giants on whose shoulders we stand. We want you to see that you are also a giant, that you are special, incredible, unique, one of a kind.”
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