Alicia Keys And Swizz Beatz’s Art Collection
Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s art collection, Giants, will be on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The exhibition features over 130 artworks by Black American and diasporic artists, exploring themes of Black identity and societal critique. The collection includes works by iconic artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Amy Sherald, as well as large-scale installations addressing issues like police brutality and cultural representation. Giants offers a platform for dialogue on Black joy, resistance, and cultural identity in contemporary art, showcasing the past, present, and future of Black artistic production. The exhibition will run from April 18 to August 9, 2026.
The exhibition, which is aptly titled Giants, was originally organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 2024, gathering more than 130 artworks from the Dean collection. The show will take a similar form at MCASD, unfolding across several thematic sections. “On the Shoulders of Giants,” for instance, traces the evolution of Black art and its intergenerational legacy, as seen through iconic artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kwame Brathwaite, Esther Mahlangu, and Gordon Parks. “Giant Conversations,” on the other hand, synthesizes two distinct lines of inquiry: one concerned with celebrating Blackness, and the other with interrogating hegemonic society. Here, guests encounter everything from Toyin Ojih Odutola’s charcoal drawings that contend with discrimination in Nigeria, to Jamel Shabazz’s bold photographs of Black New Yorkers from the 1980s.
As its name suggests, though, Giants would be incomplete without large-scale works. Luckily, the exhibition showcases monumental contributions by luminaries like Derrick Adams, Amy Sherald, and Nina Chanel Abney, among others, underscoring the collection’s “giant presence.” One such installation is Ebony G. Patterson’s they were just hanging out from 2016, which combines an ambitious assortment of materials to recall multiple incidents of police brutality against Black children. The subject’s weight is juxtaposed with the installation’s lush and highly sensorial silhouette, questioning how childhood innocence is all too often misunderstood as dangerous on account of racism.
