IN a prelude of the humongous and colourful tome, GIANTS: Art from The Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, the duo musical maestros introduce their vast art collection with these words from Kasseem Daoud Dean, a.k.a. Swizz Beatz: “People don’t know how really deep my love for art goes.
People have this perception of me that because I come from music, they think I am just some famous person who now wants to do art, but I bleed this for real, and that’s the reason I started the Dean Collection, to bring awareness” – followed by those of his wife, Alicia Keys: “As artists ourselves, we have a deep concern for fellow living artists and ensuring they receive fair recognition for their work. Our aim is to create a vibrant community where everyone receives the recognition they rightly deserve.”
“We don’t own enough of our culture. So we want to lead the pack in owning our own culture and owning our own narrative instead of waiting for someone who’s not part of the culture to tell our story for us,” the couple is quoted declaring by Kimberli Gant, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum – the institution which organized the related exhibition to this catalog.
And the Deans’ belief in ownership of one’s culture extends to their empowerment of artists associated with them, as manifested in their enabling artists to retain a higher percentage of funds from sales, and ensuring that they receive monies when their works are purchased on the secondary market. In this regard, the couple is part of a growing community of multigenerational Black art collectors – who include Spike Lee, Serena Williams, Beyoncé, et al. – in the U.S. who are supporting artists of colour, and have generated their own catalogs and exhibitions to express their philanthropy for current and future generations of artists.
The Dean Collection, points out Anne Pasternak – the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director at the Brooklyn Museum, as well as friend of the Deans, in the foreword – focuses on photographers, painters, printmakers and sculptors who are using their imagery to articulate cultural traditions, reflect the beauty and uniqueness of numerous societies around the world, and criticize the sociopolitical structures and systems affecting families, people of colour and queer communities.
Giants: Art from The Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, is segmented thematically in its exploration of variations on the term, “giants”, commencing with a section titled “On the Shoulders of Giants”, emphasizing on elder artists – a trio of whom I’ve taken the liberty of mentioning brief biographies thereof, as well as their artworks featured in the catalog. These are Esther Mahlangu, the South African self-taught artist who became the first to translate Ndebele house painting to canvas, pottery and cars. A beneficiary of Ndebele heritage passed down matrilineally wherein young girls are taught to paint house exteriors in bold colours and geometric, symbolic designs – she became the first woman and African participant in the BMW Art Car Collection in 1991.
The compilation features three plates of Mahlangu’s 2017 acrylic on canvas paintings whose colourful designs are based on her trademark razorblade-esque patterns.
Her works are sequentially followed by those of Gordon Parks, the late Kansas-born photographer and filmmaker who became the first Black American to become a Life magazine photographer in 1948 and the first to direct a Hollywood feature film in 1969. He gained renown for his documentation of life in the U.S. from the 1940s to 2000s, especially his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement.
Appearing in the tome are his monochromatic photographs of Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, Civil Rights activist, Malcolm X, prizefighter, Muhammad Ali, the Black Panthers – as well as his controversial 1948 image, American Gothic, limning an African American woman holding a broom and a mop whilst standing in front of a large American star-spangled flag.
The preceding contributors are complimented by the portraits of Kwame Brathwaite, the Brooklyn born artist whose life-changing encounter with a photograph of Emmett Till convinced him to opt for photography as a powerful medium by which to express himself. He would go on to develop a portfolio spanning seventy years that documented Black cultural icons and the Civil Rights era and fomented the “Black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s.
As an example of his kind of aesthetic, the collection includes a trio of portraits depicting a duo of Black women recorded varyingly posing embracing the natural Afro hairstyle of the 1970s and a beads-patterned headpiece, he recorded at his African Jazz Art Society and Studios. Brathwaite’s contribution is accompanied by an interview with his son, also named Kwame, in which, to a question as to what the inclusion of his father’s work in the Dean Collection means to him, he responded that it (the work) spoke of the timelessness of his photographs which – although snapped back in the late 1960s and 70s, continue to resonate today because they embody a sense of Black identity that transcend specific moments in history.
Intermediate is a segment termed “Giant Conversations”, which addresses the sub-themes of ‘Celebrating Blackness’ and ‘Critiquing Society’, while the concluding segment, “Giant Presence”, illustrates, et al., immensely scaled works by Meleko Mokgosi – a Francistown, Botswana-born artist whose paintings explore postcolonial narratives of southern Africa, with each body of work continuing the last’s effort to unravel the region’s tangled political history and its impact on contemporary African life – and those of Amy Sherald, a Georgia-born realist portraitist who produces striking portraits that chronicle the multifaceted experiences of contemporary Black American life.
Resonating with the Deans viewpoint that artists ought to reach beyond limits of their own imagination to see what they can create, their collection includes Mokgosi’s Bread, Butter and Power – a twenty-one-panel painting covering over 160 linear feet, limning interweaving scenes of the legacy of gendered divided labour within southern Africa as a metaphor for exploring democratic issues.
While Sherald’s creations comprise oversized oil on linen panels depicting gravity-defying bike riders, titled Deliverance – part of a distinct oeuvre which invites more nuanced investigations of societal preconceptions around race and representation while claiming space for Black life in American art.
Asked what she intended conveying through the artwork, the Baltimore-based creative responded that the work is an homage to the strong sense of self-sovereignty the street bike culture imbues – adding that the tableau is about the freedom to be and to become.
Also worth mentioning among the featured artists are, Hank Willis Thomas, a New Jersey-born artist whose art production extends beyond his lens-based work to sculpture, printmaking and installation, all linked by his conceptual investigation of identity, popular culture and mass consumption. He returns repeatedly to the ways in which visual culture has created and perpetuated forms of prejudice, with a particular focus on the legacies of racist structures that continue to impact contemporary Black communities.
And Kehinde Wiley, a Los Angeles-born artist known for his majestic paintings of Black subjects, appropriating the style and aesthetic of European portraiture to subvert race-and-class-based power dynamics, who was commissioned to paint the official portrait of erstwhile president Barack Obama in 2017, which is now part of the National Portrait Gallery collection in Washington, D.C. Wiley, who says giants of any major cultural movement are those who create waves, has portraits of the Deans he painted during 2024, featured.
GIANTS: Art from The Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys is the first tome to showcase selections from the groundbreaking Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. It contains one hundred works (selected from over one thousand artworks the Deans have been acquiring for more than twenty years) by thirty-eight multigenerational Black American, African and African diasporic artists in the Dean Collection, hand-picked by the Brooklyn Museum for a major exhibition of the same name.
Featuring an exclusive conversation between curator Kimberli Gant and Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, as well as ten interviews with significant artists in the Collection, this exciting tome brings together these ‘giants’ of the art world to embody the Deans’ collecting philosophy: “by the artist, for the artist, with the people.”
A hardback, GIANTS: Art from The Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys is published by Phaidon and distributed in South Africa through Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R1 715.
Image provided (GIANTS Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys – collectors, Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz).
