Eliana Willis

Kimberli Gant, curator at the Brooklyn Museum, has had a hectic week. On February 10, the museum opened “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” the first exhibition to bring together art from the couple’s collection. It’s a landmark show not just for the institution, but for the power collecting couple, who have never seen so much of their collection in one place, at one time.
“Swizz came in last Monday night and we walked through it a little bit. He was so overwhelmed, he was texting his wife, ‘You’re gonna freak out,’” Gant told me. “Then, I saw the footage of [Keys] seeing the exhibition for the first time on the Today Show and she was bawling.” 
Kehinde Wiley, Femme piquée par un serpent (2008). The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Kehinde Wiley. Photo: Glenn Steigelman.
That emotion is not unsurprising. Over the 14 years they’ve been married, the singer-songwriter and her producer husband (real name: Kasseem Dean) have built an art collection close to their hearts, now numbering in the thousands. It’s so large that the couple’s three residences in New York, New Jersey, and California can barely contain it. For the first time, then, many of these works are emerging from storage.
The show’s opening over the past week may have left Gant slightly breathless, but she doesn’t miss a beat as she walks me through “Giants,” her enthusiasm apparent. About 100 works by 37 artists have been gathered here. The exhibition took two years to coalesce. A lot of that time, Gant explained, was wrapped up in conversations with the Deans, centered on rendering their collecting ethos into an exhibition narrative. 
Ebony G. Patterson, . . . . they were just hanging out . . . you know . . . talking about . . . ( . . . when they grow up . . .) (2016). The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Ebony G. Patterson. Courtesy of the artist, Monique Meloche Gallery, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo: Adam Reich.
“One of the main things for them is people of the culture owning their own role and culture,” she explained. “They said, look, we have a family, we want to see ourselves on these walls, and be able to create a legacy for our kids.” 
Gant is referencing the historic erasure of Black culture and figures from the Western art canon—a lack of representation that the Deans are addressing by collecting the work of storied and living Black artists whom the couple deem “giants.” Fittingly, the show opens with Ebony G. Patterson’s room-filling installation, a glitter-lined ode to childhood. A pair of massive portraits of Keys and Swizz follow, resplendently painted by Kehinde Wiley, the artist’s Renaissance-esque flourishes an act of reclamation. 
Esther Mahlangu, Ndebele Abstract (2017). The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Esther Mahlangu. Photo: Glenn Steigelman.
The adjacent gallery kickstarts the motif of “Giants” with a showcase of works by Black artists whose legacies paved the way for today. Basquiat is here, as is Barnes. But the spotlight belongs to a trio of canvases by Esther Mahlangu, bearing the striking geometric language of the South African artist’s Ndebele heritage. The Deans, said Gant, “really want to emphasize the idea that artists should create beyond what they think their limits are,” highlighting how Mahlangu translated her background in house-painting into a fine art career. “This is a legacy that has been happening for generations upon generations that most people don’t know about,” she added. “Now, it has a worldwide following, but it starts on the shoulders of giants.” 
Installation view of “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Danny Perez.
It’s on those shoulders that the artists in the following room stand on. Here, the space is dominated by a sequence of large-scale paintings by Meleko Mokgosi. Titled “Bread, Butter, and Power” (2018), the vivid series sees the artist pointedly critiquing the asymmetrical power structures in his native Botswana. A painting of a lone man in a drab room illustrates the reality of domestic work, Gant pointed out; another of a group of Black children dressed in typically British school uniforms alludes to the unequal access to education. 
These are quotidian scenes, but, Gant stressed, “It’s layer upon layer upon layer of history. It’s an epic of the mundane.” 
The unseen systems at work against Black communities also surface in neighboring works. Henry Taylor‘s stark portrait of a homeless man, Jordan Casteel‘s compelling depiction of a Black vendor, and Hank Willis Thomas‘s powerful sculpture Strike (2018) “create a sense of visibility,” Gant said, around the lived experiences of Black folk.  
Derrick Adams, Floater 74 (2018). The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © 2023 Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
And Black people have fun, too. Derrick Adams‘s Floater 74 (2018), depicting a luxurious pool scene complete with giant floats and sunbathers, leads into the following section celebrating Black excellence. Gathered here are works by contemporary artists, including Frida Orupabo, Deborah Roberts, Tschabalala Self, and Mickalene Thomas, whose playful and thoughtful experiments with medium and material are currently enriching the Black visual vernacular.  
It’s also here that the Deans’s forward-looking approach to collecting is borne out. As collectors, their aim is to build for posterity, not simply showcase. As Swizz explained in a video accompanying the exhibition, they are not in the “hype race of collecting.” He added: “It’s for the longevity play.” 
Deborah Roberts, The Visionary (2018). The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Deborah Roberts. Photo: Glenn Steigelman.
Which is not to say the Deans don’t get to live with their art. Gant pointed out that she first encountered Keys and Swizz’s art collection in the pages of Architectural Digest, in a 2021 feature highlighting the couple’s oceanfront home and art trove. That domestic scene is recreated in “Giants,” in two separate alcoves where visitors can recline on plush armchairs to take in a group of delicate landscapes by Barkley L. Hendricks in one and a serene series of ballerina portraits by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in another. 
What can’t go unseen is a section dedicated to photography. Jamel Shabazz‘s joyous street-style images from the 1980s are arrayed on one wall opposite one of Gordon Parks‘s genre-spanning photography. The Deans own the largest collection of Parks’s works in private hands and “Giants” does justice to his oeuvre, displaying his visual records of the U.S. civil rights movement as much as his commercial photography.  
Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Model Who Embraced Natural Hairstyles at AJASS Photoshoot) (c. 1970, printed 2018). The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. © Kwame Brathwaite. Photo: Joshua White / JWPictures.com.
The exhibition’s theme is, quite literally, amplified in its closing gallery, which brings forth gigantic works from the Deans’s holdings. There’s a vast canvas by Titus Kaphar, his signature splice evident; a buoyant spread by Nina Chanel Abney; and Amy Sherald‘s twinned tributes to the dirt-bikers.
But to see all of it, you’ll have to navigate Arthur Jafa‘s towering Big Wheel I (2018), an eight-foot-tall monument, crafted with a tire and chains, that confronts the trauma of racial violence via the monster truck culture of his native Mississippi. It’s a formidable, breathtaking sculpture. “This work isn’t fitting in the house,” Gant said with some understatement. 
Installation view of “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
More vitally, the work takes up space—institutional space that’s historically been reserved for white representation, but also the spaces within the cultural canon and consciousness—as it should. Which, ultimately, underscores the Deans’ efforts in giving air to Black joy, pain, resistance, and resilience, urging Black creators, they said, to “be our most giant selves.” That, as the exhibition demonstrates, would dwarf the biggest room.
“All this work,” noted Gant, “has a presence.” 
“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, through July 7. 
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Jetpacks, wristwatch dart guns, and submarine sports cars. High-tech gadgets that blend the lethal with the sartorial are emblematic of the world’s most famous spy, James Bond. Fans of the secret agent and his movie franchise will have the opportunity to see the iconic devices for themselves at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago’s forthcoming exhibition, “007 Science: Inventing the World of James Bond.” 
Produced in partnership with Eon Productions, the creators of the James Bond films, the show is the first-ever to focus on the science and technology of the Bond movies. It will feature 13 vehicles and over 90 artifacts, delving into the real science that went into developing the spy’s gadgets and stunts.
“The James Bond universe lies at the intersection of science fiction and science fact,” said Chevy Humphrey, the museum’s president and CEO, in a statement.
Sean Connery as James Bond wearing the iconic jetpack in Thunderball (1965). Photo: Eon Productions.
Pushing the boundaries of what is possible with futuristic, cutting-edge technology has long been key to the allure of the Bond franchise. Attendees will learn how real science drove many of the movies’ story elements and how the films, in turn, prefigured some real-world inventions. Imagined tools like the suction cup climbers used in the movie You Only Live Twice (1967), for example, will be juxtaposed with real-world Gecko Gloves that allow people to climb walls.
Other gadgets in the exhibition include a retina scanner that allowed access into the MI6 communications room in Golden Eye (1995), the Parahawk snowmobile hybrid from The World Is Not Enough (1999), and a safe-cracking device from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969). 
Visitors can also experiment in a lab space inspired by “Q”, the MI6 division in the Bond universe that develops top-secret technologies. There, guests can test their spycraft skills by designing vehicles and developing stunts. 
See more gadgets featured in the show below.
SK-8A all-in-one surveillance kit, used by the CIA in the ‘60s and ‘70s, on loan from the International Spy Museum. Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
A passport of one of the secret agent’s aliases from Casino Royale (2006) starring Daniel Craig. Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
Steel teeth belonged to Jaws, the henchman in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
Bond villain Tee-Hee’s prosthetic arm complete with mechanical claw from Live and Let Die (1973). Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
Snooper, a roving robot controlled by Q, seen in A View to a Kill (1985). Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
A plutonium container featured in The World is Not Enough (1999). Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
The dagger shoes from From Russia, With Love (1963) and Die Another Day (2002). Photo: Museum of Science and Industry.
“007 Science: Inventing the World of James Bond” is on view at the Museum of Science and Industry, 5700 S. DuSable, Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, from March 7 through October 27.
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A contested ancestral wooden sculpture owned by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) will be temporarily loaned to the artist collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) as part of their exhibition for the Dutch Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. It will go on display at a gallery in Lusanga, a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and be livestreamed into the Dutch pavilion for the duration of the biennale, which runs from April 20 to November 24, 2024.
The wooden figure was carved by a Pende artist from the Kwilu province of the DRC after the Pende Revolt against Belgian colonial rule in 1931. It is a depiction of the abusive colonizer Maximilien Balot, who was decapitated during the uprising, and is intended to contain and control his angry spirit. In this way, it would protect the Pende people.
In 1972, the sculpture, known as “Balot,” was bought by an American collector for just $120. He later sold it to the VMFA, where it has been since 2015. CATPC has long pushed for the figure’s return to Lusanga, where it would be reunited with members of the local community ranging from traditional chiefs to current plantation workers.
Chief’s or Diviner’s Figure Representing the Belgian Colonial Officer, Maximilien Balot, circa 1931. Photo: Travis Fullerton, © 2015 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“By restoring the balance and correcting past injustices, the return of Balot will allow us to continue to buy back the land that was taken from us by colonial forces,” said the artist Ced’art Tamasala on behalf of CATPC. “It will enable us to abolish forced and destructive monoculture and to plant, regenerate and nourish back into existence our sacred forests.”
Alex Nyerges, the director of VMFA, said the museum is “delighted to partner with CATPC,” adding, “we hope it will inspire a new era of collaboration and partnerships between museums on both continents.”
These comments suggest that some resolution has occurred between CATPC and VMFA since 2022, when the artist collective minted a collection of 300 NFTs containing a rotating image of Balot without the museum’s permission.
“Unfortunately, the NFT has broken all trust between VMFA and the exhibition organizers,” he told me,” Nyerges told Artnet News at the time, branding the NFTs “unacceptable.” He added that VFMA would no longer loan the work to CATPC to be exhibited at the White Cube, an art gallery in Lusanga founded by the CAPTC in 2017.
Now it seems he has changed his mind and Balot is expected to go on public display at the White Cube in April. The loan is being funded by the Mondriaan Fund, which is organizing the Dutch Pavilion.
CATPC invests any proceeds from its artistic projects towards buying back plantation land that was formerly owned by the company Unilever. The collective has been collaborating with Dutch artist Renzo Martens for years, and will partner with him once again for its forthcoming exhibition at the Dutch Pavilion in Venice.
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The annual commission for Tate Modern’s capacious Turbine Hall has tended to go to established artists at the height of their careers: Louise Bourgeois for the first edition in 2000, Anish Kapoor in 2002, and Bruce Nauman in 2005. This year, though, Tate said that the closely watched exhibition will be staged by the daring 35-year-old artist Mire Lee, whose disturbing and alluring kinetic sculptures have appeared in major shows around the world over the past few years.
Lee, who works between Seoul and Amsterdam, joins a small group of artists who have been tapped for the London venue in their mid-30s, including Olafur Eliasson (in 2004) and Tino Sehgal (2012).
Details on Lee’s project are sparse, for now, but the dates are set. Her Hyundai Commission, as the series is known, will open on October 8, the week of the Frieze art fair in London, and run through March 16. A triumvirate is curating: Ann Coxon and Alvin Li, curators of international art at Tate Modern, and Bilal Akkouche, an assistant curator there.
The Tate display comes as Lee has been on a tear, contributing thrilling pieces to the 2022 iterations of the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and the Busan Biennale in her native South Korea. In Busan, Lee erected scaffolding in a massive abandoned building and mounted on it fabric torn with holes that suggested lesions or burns.
Other recent pieces by Lee—powered by motors, flowing with vile-seeming substances—can bring to mind malfunctioning organs or malformed creatures as they transmit fraught psychological states. They sometimes appear to be breaking down or metamorphosing.
“I always wanted to make wild-looking kind of works, or crude works,” Lee told me in an interview for the New York Times as she prepped a solo outing last year at the New Museum in New York. Using motors and other unusual techniques, she said, “gave me surprising results.”
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Roelant Savery, the industrious Dutch Golden Age artist best known for his painting of the dodo bird, is the subject of a new exhibition at the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, Netherlands. Titled “Roelant Savery’s Wondrous World,” the show celebrates the painter’s iconic depiction the now-extinct species, but also his work as the first Dutch artist to paint floral still lifes and street scenes.
Savery, who lived from 1578 to 1639, spent the better part of his career as a court painter to the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II in Prague. The emperor’s wealth and connections allowed Savery to explore a variety of subjects and genres. He produced some of the earliest known topographical drawings of the Czech capital, featuring landmarks like the Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, and the Strahov Monastery.
One of these cityscapes includes a small self-portrait, showing Savery, sketchbook in hand, recording his exotic surroundings.
Roelant Savery, View of Prague (1604–08). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (acquisition F.G. Waller Fund). Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
Like other Dutch artists from the time, Savery enjoyed drawing ordinary people as they went about their day. These sketches range from a young man sleeping in the street, to a beggar wearing tattered clothes, to a group of well-dressed Jewish people on their way to the Neualtschul (“Old New”) synagogue in Prague, the latter of which constitute some of first artistic depictions of Jews in Europe.
Roelant Savery, Sleeping Young Man, Probably Pieter Boddaert (1606–07). P. & N. de Boer Foundation, Amsterdam. Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
Roelant Savery, Vase with Flowers in a Stone Niche (1615). Mauritshuis, (acquired with the support of the VriendenLoterij, the Rembrandt Association, and Mr H.B. van der Ven, 2016). Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
The exhibition also documents Savery’s a passion for flora and fauna. Some of his still lifes feature as many as 64 species of flowers. He frequently visited the imperial menageries, which included a deer park, a pheasant garden, and an area for Rudolf’s collection of lions. The Mauritshuis noted that, while many of these animals could never coexist in the wild, “in Savery’s paintings they peacefully lived side by side,” united by biblical and mythological symbolism.
Roelant Savery, Two Horses and Grooms (1628). City Collection, Abby Kortrijk. Photo courtesy of the Mauritshuis.
Although many of Savery’s paintings are not scientifically accurate, his most famous portrait of the dodo played an important role in the early scientific community. In the 19th century, biologist Richard Owen, the first superintendent of the Natural History Museum in London (which holds the painting), placed it next to an actual dodo skeleton to explain the creature’s confounding anatomy to students. To this day, the notoriety of the dodo and its evolutionary fate is closely linked to the popularity of Savery’s painting.
“Roelant Savery’s Wondrous World” is on view at the Mauritshuis, Plein 29, 2511 CS Den Haag, the Netherlands, through May 20.
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Pace is mounting its first exhibition of work by the late artist Chuck Close, whom the gallery has represented since 1977. The show may answer the question of whether the art market, and the art world in general, will support the work of an artist who was accused of inappropriate behavior by models in one of the most prominent art-world examples of the Me Too movement. 
“Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings” will feature paintings, photographs, and works on paper, most of them formerly unseen, all employing only the three primary colors. A catalogue will feature a formerly unpublished 2018 conversation between Close and the artist Cindy Sherman (also known for her depictions of faces and her self-portraits), originally commissioned for the Brooklyn Rail. Also featured will be a new essay by critic Carter Ratcliff on the late works and one by Barbara Knappmeyer, associate director and scientific program manager at the New York Academy of Sciences, on Close’s work in the context of facial recognition technology. 
Two former models accused Close of sexually inappropriate behavior in 2017. He apologized for his “dirty mouth.” According to his CV on Pace’s website, after the accusations emerged, he had no solo shows until 2020; he had only three solo presentations in 2020 and 2021, and none since then. Zachary Small, writing for Artnet News in 2021, asked whether his supporters could stage a posthumous comeback. His works have sold at auction for as much as $4.3 million, fetched by a 1971–72 portrait of painter John Roy at Sotheby’s New York in 2005.
Close became known for his large-scale photorealist portraits that departed from the dominant paradigm of Minimalist art in the 1960s and 1970s. He painted self-portraits as well as a who’s who of cultural figures, including Cecily Brown, Alex Katz, Richard Serra, and Cindy Sherman. His focus on faces grew partly out of his having suffered from facial blindness. In 1988, Close suffered a spinal aneurysm that left him paralyzed, and he relied on a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He was able to paint—despite doctors’ predictions—after extensive rehabilitation and through the use of brush-holding devices strapped to his wrist and forearm.
Close’s work resides in public collections internationally, including those of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Gallery in London, and the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
“Red, Yellow and Blue: The Last Paintings” is on view at Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York, through April 13. 
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A tender image of a young polar bear drifting off to sleep in a bed he carved out of an iceberg has won over the masses. The photograph, titled Ice Bed, won British amateur photographer Nima Sarikhani the People’s Choice Award for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a prize organized by London’s Natural History Museum.
To capture the image, Sarikhani spent three days searching for polar bears through a dense fog around Norway’s far-northern Svalbard archipelago. Finally encountering a young male bear just before midnight, he watched as it climbed the small iceberg, clawed away at the sea ice, then curled up into a serene slumber.
In a statement, Douglas Gurr, the museum’s director, described the image as a poignant reflection on habitat loss: “His thought-provoking image is a stark reminder of the integral bond between an animal and its habitat.”
The photograph was selected from a shortlist of 25 images, whittled down from 50,000 submissions. A record 75,000 voters participated in the 59th installment of the competition. The image, along with four other “highly commended” finalists, will be on view at the London museum through June 30.
Audun Rikardsen, Aurora Jellies. Photo: © Audun Rikardsen / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
The other finalists include Norwegian photographer Audun Rikardsen, who captured Aurora Jellies, an ethereal image of the aurora borealis illuminating the night sky over the waters of a fjord, aglow with the bioluminescence of moon jellyfish.
Kenyan Photographer Mark Boyd captured two lionesses grooming one of their shared cubs together after an unsuccessful hunt. Lionesses raise each other’s cubs as their own. Shared Parenting evokes the bond of sisterhood as well as the universal love of motherhood.
Mark Boyd, Shared Parenting. Photo: © Mark Boyd, Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Starling Murmuration by German/Romanian photographer Daniel Dencescu was shot in Rome, Italy. He followed the starlings across the city for days as they danced across the sky, creating enchanting organic shapes. In Israeli photographer Tzahi Finkelstein’s The Happy Turtle, a balkan pond turtle smiles as a northern banded groundling dragonfly pays it a visit in the swampy waters of Israel’s Jezreel Valley.
Tzahi Finkelstein, The Happy Turtle. Photo: © Tzahi Finkelstein / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Daniel Dencescu, Starling Murmuration. Photo: © Daniel Dencescu / Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
The prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition celebrates the nature-focused work of amateur or professional photographers. The 60th edition is currently being judged by an international panel, with its winners set to be announced in October 2024.
“Wildlife Photographer of the Year” is on view at the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, South Kensington, London, through June 30.
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