09-03-2025
'Giants' brings the provocative, exciting collection of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats to the Mia
A pair of drum machines, turntables, Alicia Keys' Yamaha CP-70 piano stenciled with 'Love' and 'Freedom,' Swizz Beats' eight-channel mixer, and a trio of BMX bikes. These objects greet visitors before they step into the Minneapolis Institute of Art's latest exhibit, 'Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.'
Put together by Kimberli Grant, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, 'Giants' glimpses into the collection of the New York musicians. While the rest of the exhibit isn't as concerned with objects as the foyer, it sets a tone.
It's a collection with an eye on both history and modernity. Those opening pieces, coupled with a soundtrack selected by Swizz Beats playing throughout the galleries, offer an inescapable sense that history is alive and taking place in plain sight. (The foyer also contains towering portraits of the collectors by Kehinde Wiley, an artist the Mia recently declined to exhibit due to allegations of sexual assault.)
The nearly 100 pieces, many of which are appropriately giant, predominantly feature Black diasporic artists, including familiar names like Jean-Michel Basquiat and one-time St. Paul resident Gordon Parks, as well as a glittering soundsuit by Nick Cave, massive paintings of BMX bikers in Baltimore by Michelle Obama portraitist Amy Sherald, a multi-media collage by Ebony G. Patterson, and photographs by Jamel Shabazz.
The music, the pervasive reminders that this is a private collection, and the thoughtful themeing of rooms — 'Becoming Giants,' 'Giant Presence,' 'Giant Conversation,' and 'On the Shoulders of Giants' — provide encouragement to connect the frequently bright and large-scale pieces to one another and to broader histories beyond the museum's walls.
Amid Titus Kaphar's powerful triptychs or the awe-inducing room of paintings on gender and colonialism by Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi, 'Giants' amplifies the political themes found in individual pieces. Together, they provoke discussion on how collecting can be an investigation into which voices are centered and heard. (It's something Kaphar's "A Puzzled Revolution," found in the exhibit's second room, probes itself.)
The statements on race and other issues are timely, arriving in Minneapolis just before the five-year anniversary of the Minneapolis Police killing of George Floyd. The presentation of bold artists assembled this way feels prescient in a moment when diversity initiatives are being vilified and extinguished, attempted book bans continue, and the government threatens to withhold funding from arts organizations that center artists of color, women, or queer voices.
Even the exhibition's sponsorship — in part, the Center for Racial and Health Equity at Blue Cross Blue Shield, hosted in the Target Special Exhibitions Gallery — seems to invite these conversations as headlines frequently highlight the inequities of the healthcare system and Target retreats from diversity initiatives. It's a stark juxtaposition with a piece like Hank Willis Thomas' "You Shouldn't Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas (LeWitt)," a quilt made from the cloth of decommissioned prison uniforms.
'Giants,' full of exciting individual pieces thoughtfully assembled, will reward repeat visits for all it has to say, spoken and unspoken.
