THE DEANS' LIST

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY POWER COUPLE ALICIA KEYS AND KASSEEM "SWIZZ BEATZ" DEAN HAVE HELPED LEAD THE WAY FOR A GENERATION OF COLLECTORS OF BLACK ART. THE REST OF THE WORLD IS FINALLY CATCHING UP

- NATE FREEMAN

IN EARLY 2015, the musician Kasseem Dean, known as Swizz Beatz, went with artist Kehinde Wiley to see his retrospective, “A New Republic,” at the Brooklyn Museum. Dean had been churning out hits as a hip-hop producer for more than two decades, propelling singles by the likes of Jay-Z, DMX, Busta Rhymes, and Beyoncé to global inescapability. But Dean, along with his Grammy-winning superstar wife, Alicia Keys, is also a contemporary-art patron who caught the bug well before his peers in the hip-hop game.

“A lot of people used to make fun of me collecting art—I won’t say no names, but they’re the biggest names,” Dean told me recently.

“We were so hardcore in music, I was a Ruff Ryder, everybody was more in their street element, and so collecting art….” he trailed off.

Walking through the Wiley show in 2015, Dean was already itching to move to the next echelon. The loaned works came from institutions all over the country but also a number of private collectors: a hedge fund executive, a manager at a different hedge fund, the manager of a tech billionaire’s family office. Dean realized, reading the wall labels, that he saw “no last names of color.”

Wiley and Dean walked in front of Femme piquée par un serpent, a 25-foot-long painting of a Black man in bed based on a sculpture in the Musee d’Orsay. “Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York,” its label read, referring to Wiley’s commercial gallery. Such wording is often a super-insider way to say, “This might just be for sale.”