In a coup, artworks owned by Alicia Keys and husband Swizz Beatz are coming to Minnesota in March

The Rockefellers. The Waltons. The Deans?

Some of America’s blue-chip families are renowned for their priceless art holdings. Add music superstar Alicia Keys and husband Kasseem Dean, best known as the rapper, producer and music impresario Swizz Beatz, to that list.

The entertainment power couple have used their purse, prestige and patronage to build a world-class art collection. And they are displaying a fraction of their pieces in a groundbreaking exhibit called “Giants: Art From the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.”

In a coup, the show that celebrates the creativity and brilliance of artists in the Black diaspora is slated to open next March 9 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, its third stop after beginning in February at the Brooklyn Museum then traveling to Atlanta’s High Museum.

Why Minnesota?

“Prince is always a connection,” said Keys, who recorded music from the state’s musical icon, with whom she shared a passion for creativity and the color purple.

Keys also alluded to the wounds that remain locally and nationally in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The oversized works in “Giants” speak to communal dreaming to reach our grander, more ideal selves, she said.

“We know that there is so much healing that has to happen — that is happening,” Keys said, pointing to the themes in the show. “We are the custodians and guardians of each other’s healing.”

Dean added that it’s important to share this work to inspire ordinary people and creative types alike, especially those who have been under-represented.

“A lot of artists of color are not allowed to do works this size,” Dean said. “When people come to a museum and see work of scale that reflects them, it gives them confidence and energy [and a revelation]. I can be larger than life through creativity.”

The Deans have had stratospheric success in music, with Keys winning 16 Grammys, selling 90 million albums globally and performing at the Super Bowl halftime show. She also is the composer of a Broadway musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” that is about to go on a 30-plus city national tour.

Dean, also a Grammy winner, has worked with Beyonce, Jay Z and Whitney Houston, among others. He has been described as a visionary for starting the collection.

“My wife is definitely a visionary, as well,” Dean said. “I remember when I was collecting early a lot of my peers would laugh at me and now they have advisers and art collections and things like that.”

They have entered the museum world in a big way, using their platform to bring artists to the fore while building a legacy for children, including their own. They spoke about their exhibit via a Zoom interview.

“We want our kids to have [this work] around them and also when we put the works on the road for other people to get an educational experience,” Dean said.

Named for the size of the works, the stature of the artists involved and the ambition of the show to instill a sense of magisterial heft into viewers, “Giants” is kaleidoscopic in its scale and scope. Its 100-plus pieces draw works from artists such as Kehinde Wiley, First Lady portraitist Amy Sherald and Minnesota Renaissance legend Gordon Parks.

Parks’ classic shots of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali sit in conversation with the 1980s street photographs of Jamel Shabazz, which capture style, fashion and resilience even as they are separated by decades.

Keys said she’s inspired by what the photos, including Parks’ famous image of Ella Watson, say individually and by juxtaposition.

“With Shabazz, I’m seeing my lifetime and then [with Parks] I’m seeing my grandmother’s lifetime or my great grandmother’s lifetime,” Keys said. “You’re able to see this exchange of spirit being captured through the lens and I just I’m just taken by it every time.”

The show includes not only photographs, paintings and sculptures but also installations, record albums and musical equipment. In fact, the exhibit has such a natural rhythmic flow, with themes being mixed and remixed, that it sometimes resonates like its own musical composition.

An installation on lost childhood innocence by Chicago-based Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson gives way to a room-sized, 33-panel work by Botswana-born painter and Yale professor Meleko Mokgosi.

A sculptural Soundsuit by fiber artist Nick Cave is in conversation with regal, intricate charcoal-and-pencil paintings by Nigerian artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, whose jewel-eyed details bring out a sublime grace in her subjects.

“The way that [these pieces] play together is like a song, like a journey, and it’s very beautiful,” Keys said, adding that the exhibit creates “a space to feel your power, your ancestry, your growth, your future, your present. And no matter who you are, what walk of life you’ve come from, you feel it.”

Audiences in New York and Atlanta have quickened to the work.

Keys recalls standing with Odutola in front of one of her pieces in the show and how the two related as simpatico artists.

Toyin “was expressing how she sometimes looks back at her older works and they shock her a little — like [she feels] slightly embarrassed because you can see the progression and the growth,” Keys said. “I understand that same feeling because there are songs that I have that sometimes I listen to and I’m like, ‘Man, my voice is so much stronger now.’”

Still, Keys continued, there’s beauty and affirmation for anyone in charting one’s artistic, spiritual and aesthetic progress in art

“With art and music, we’re bearing witness to our own growth,” Keys said.

Dean is a fan of BMX bikes, and they’re represented in oversized pieces in “Giants.” Those bikes were much-coveted status symbols when he was growing up in the Bronx.

“If you had a Haro or a Mongoose or a GT Performer, it was like you made it — the bar was set so low for us,” Dean said. But what was once a ceiling is now a floor, and with his power, he gets to showcase a childhood dream on the grandest of platforms.

In fact, one of the things that’s different about “Giants” is the story of the Deans, who knew each other in childhood but married in 2010. Their courtship included a first date where Dean was late for an art-related reason. He was trying to put together something that involved Erté, the nom de plume of Russian-born Art Deco painter and designer Romain de Tirtoff, and a piano, Keys’ signature instrument.

“My entry point to art was graffiti in the South Bronx,” Dean said. “Her entry point was Erté and a couple of different things. And now we meet at the same crossroads and realize that this journey is bigger than us.”

They curate the works based on what they like instinctually. And the pair work in harmony, to use their favorite analogy, to create something larger than either of them could individually.

They also have strong relationships with artists, who they deal with directly.

“Because we’re both artists and we understand what it takes to make something out of nothing — what type of bravery that takes and how hard it is to create that over and over again — we have a deep respect for the artists and they for us,” Keys said. “We don’t want to be transactional. We really want to build something that is beyond what’s hanging on the walls.”

Asked to name some of their favorite pieces in the show, they both demurred but eventually relented. For Dean, the list includes two paintings by Ernie Barnes, whose work, “The Sugar Shack,” was used extensively in the TV show “Good Times.”

That famous piece sold at auction two years ago for $15.3 million.

The Deans had a personal relationship with Barnes, and his pieces in “Giants” bookend his career.

“We have Ernie Barnes’ first work he ever did and his last work sitting right next to each other, which is unique and powerful,” Dean said. “Ernie Barnes was a mentor to me. I used to fly him and his wife out to the house, and he would pick out the place in the house where he wanted his works to hang.”

The collection includes pieces by Wiley, who painted respective portraits of the Deans in the same iconic style he applied to his official portrait of Barack Obama.

Paying it forward

Wiley often puts contemporary Black figures in classical settings. Nowhere is this clearer than in his 25-foot-long, wall-sized work “Femme piquée par un serpent.” Nodding to Auguste Clésinger’s 1847 marble sculpture that’s in Paris’ Musee D’Orsay, Wiley’s painting is of an ordinary Black man who may have been shot, his body twisting in a field of flowers.

“Art is a communication, like a lot of people academically probably can’t express themselves, but through art, you know, they’re brilliant,” Dean said. “I was one of those people. I expressed myself more through creativity rather than sitting in the classroom answering the biggest math question.”

For both Dean and Keys, “Giants” nods to a legacy that they continue to build. The show reflects their tastes, but they want it to impart joy and spiritual affirmation in viewers.

After all, “we collect art from the heart,” he said.

That heart includes inspiration, playfulness, cosmic desires and some wit.

In the Caribbean, there’s a saying said almost exclusively by women who’ve had enough of a conversation and are about to jet: “Chat to mi back.” Lorna Simpson’s photographs in “Giants” include some of women’s backs, showing figures unburdened of the need to smile and please a viewer.

The Deans said they cannot wait to share their show with Minnesotans, and plan to come in for a star-studded opening. Each installation is a new interpretation of the works, they said, and the conversation the pieces have with each other as well as with audiences is always surprising.

“I remember our first time at the Brooklyn Museum, and we walked in. Swizz had been there before me — you know he’s 1,000% OCD when it comes to the art and I love that so much about him — and so when I joined him, we were standing in the room with the Meleko piece, which occupies the entire room,” Keys said. “I am not a crier, but in that room, I started to cry. It really did feel like we were standing on the shoulders of [giants].”