From Brooklyn Museum to the Super Bowl: A Giant Week for Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz

Feb 28

Derrick Adams, Woman in Grayscale (Alicia) [left] and Man in Grayscale (Swizz)

The following piece was originally published by Ocula.

A glimpse into the collection of two larger-than-life entertainers at Brooklyn Museum, New York, brings the art and entertainment worlds together, transcending race to celebrate artistry.

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys (10 February–7 July 2024) opened to the public Saturday, during a week that included the show's star-studded VIP opening and Keys' performance with rap superstar Usher at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

Pop diva Keys and her rapper/producer husband Beatz are long-time collectors of 20th and 21st-century Black art. Among those who attended the show's debut were Tina Knowles—mother and mentor of Beyoncé and Solange and a champion of Black art—rappers Queen Latifah, Fabolous, Lil Baby, Tierra Whack, and actress Tracee Ellis Ross.

Arthur Jafa, Big Wheel 1 (2018). Exhibition view: Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, Brooklyn Museum, New York (10 February–7 July 2024). Courtesy Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.

Standouts among over 100 works by 37 artists included in Giants is Big Wheel 1 (2018) by Arthur Jafa. The two-metre-diameter truck tyre is supported by an immense gantry, its tremendous potential constrained by a clinging swathe of steel chains.

Part of a series of seven monster-truck tyre works by Jafa, this colossus serves as a metaphor for the show itself: an exhibition of super-sized painting, photography, and sculpture presented by two larger-than-life entertainers, intended to introduce viewers to the giant within their soul

'We want people to see themselves. We want people to feel inspired .... we want you to see that you are also a giant. That you are special, incredible, unique,' Keys said in a video introducing the show on the Museum's website.

In addition to Jafa's Big Wheel 1, the exhibition features monumental works by such art world 'giants' as Titus Kaphar, Kehinde Wiley, Amy Sherald, and Kwame Brathwaite, alongside works of more modest size by creators no-less influential: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Derrick Adams, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Gordon Parks.

Several works illustrate moments from history that continue to resonate through the years. Titus Kaphar's monumental oil on canvas A Puzzled Revolution samples Neil Leifer's famous 1964 Sports Illustrated photo of a snarling Muhammad Ali standing triumphant over a fallen Sonny Liston. In Kaphar's version, the two Black men are replaced, collage style, with a Renaissance-style portrait of a praying Virgin Mary.

Femme piquée par un serpent (2008), a 7.5-metre-long painting by Kehinde Wiley, references Auguste Clésinger's sculpture Woman Bitten by a Serpent (1847) and is part of Wiley's series honouring victims of deadly police violence. Wiley became the first African American artist to paint the portrait of an American president with his painting of President Barack Obama, which toured America before being delivered to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in 2022.

Giants features some two dozen photographs by the renowned photographer Gordon Parks, who documented the Black experience in America from the 1940s through the 1970s. The portraits include Muhammad Ali, Jackie Robinson, and Malcolm X, as well as members of the Black Panthers revolutionary party and ordinary people, all chronicling the early years of the Civil Rights Movement.

Beatz told Cultured magazine in 2018: 'The collection started not just because we're art lovers, but also because there's not enough people of colour collecting artists of colour.'

Portraits of Keys and Beatz, including Derrick Adams' 2017 Woman in Grayscale (Alicia) and Man in Grayscale (Swizz) in matching black, white, and grey paint, graphite, and fabric, illustrate new power structures at play. Sighted from the profile, the stars gaze at one another, displayed above a set of Beatz's turntables originally owned by Grandmaster Roc Raida, one of his early inspirations.

Although the show features work exclusively by Black artists, the crowds at the Brooklyn Museum have been nothing if not diverse. Giants is a show that seeks to transcend race and succeeds, conjuring a quote from Jafa in the New York Times a few years ago that echoes Keys' introduction: 'I'm not addressing white people in my work; I'm addressing Black folks, but everyone gets to listen in.' —[O]