Basquiat, Gordon Parks... The “giant” artists of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz exhibited in New York

She is a world star of R'n'B, he an influential hip-hop producer: music's leading couple, Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats have also assembled a rich collection of art, focused on African-American artists or of the “black diaspora”, unveiled in New York.

Open to the public on Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, the exhibition is called Giants, for the size of certain works, but also because “we want you to see the giants on whose shoulders we stand”, underlines the pianist in a video and singer with 16 Grammy Awards, since her first hit Fallin' (2001) or for the timeless Empire State of Mind with Jay-Z.

Among the “giants” of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats, the essentials include the New York prodigy Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the Malian photographer Malik Sidibé (1936-2016), or the American Gordon Parks (1912-2006), who documented racial segregation and the civil rights movement in the United States.

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The exhibition mainly highlights living artists, such as Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, now known for their portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, and whose paintings subvert the history of Western art to include African-American characters. Or the Botswanan painter based in the United States Meleko Mokgosi, whose monumental fresco Bread, Butter and Power, larger than life, explores the relationships of power and gender in the societies of southern Africa. Also included are Kwame Brathwaite (1938-2023), photographer of the “Black is beautiful” movement, and Jamel Shabazz, who captured the hip-hop atmosphere of New York in the lens.

Born in the Bronx, both a DJ and producer, Swizz Beats achieved success before he turned 20, launching the career of rapper DMX. From this time he began to acquire works and he is today considered a pioneer for the promotion of black artists, some of whom have seen their popularity explode in recent years. Close to the Brooklyn Museum, Swizz Beats was a member of the board of directors.

Among the artists exhibited, there is also Ernie Barnes (1938-2009), who was an American football player and painter and whose acrylic on canvas, Sugar Shack, used on the cover of the album I want you by Marvin Gaye, was soared to $15.2 million at auction in 2022, ten times more than its estimate. “We collect artists from all over the world. The reason why we focused on artists of color (...) is because our own community did not collect these giants,” emphasizes Swizz Beats in the video.

The exhibition also illustrates the quest for a younger and more diverse audience in cultural institutions. “In art history, narratives always tend to focus on “Eurocentric” stories. Most museums are faced with the fact that these stories have permeated their collections over generations, even centuries,” Kimberli Gant, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, told AFP. “Through the exhibitions they present and the works of art they acquire, museums try to show that the world is much more complex, much less ordered, much more nuanced than has perhaps been shown the collections they have had for a long time,” she adds.

This Saturday, February 10, the day when the collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats will be unveiled to the public, an exhibition on another icon of hip-hop culture in New York, the filmmaker Spike Lee, will end at the Brooklyn Museum, while the Whitney Museum, located in Manhattan, honored the artist Henry Taylor, who depicted the life of African-Americans.