Review: 'Giants' at Minneapolis Institute of Art delivers bold, big, colorful works

Two effervescent paintings of Baltimore-based guys riding colorful dirt bikes, popping wheelies against a bright blue background, show "Black people doing stuff," in the words of artist Amy Sherald. Giant paintings by Meleko Mokgosi cleverly use an 18th-century European history painting style to discuss gender politics, colonialism, class and power in Botswana. Jamel Shabazz's candid street photographs of Black people in New York from the 1980s to the mid-2010s show youth on the subway, a mother wearing a gold chain, holding her child, who's clad in a blue puffy coat.

These are just a few of nearly 100 works in "Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys," a show that originated at the Brooklyn Museum and opens Saturday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

The timing of this show is charged. It just missed Black History Month, but arrives shortly before the five-year anniversary of George Floyd's killing by Minneapolis police. It speaks loudly to the current moment of the Trump administration's withholding institutional and grant-based funding for exhibitions and projects by artists — including artists of color and queer people.

The show ends with Gordon Parks' pictures of racism, segregation and the long road to the civil rights-era giants, bringing it all back to Minnesota. The show also features artists of the global Black diaspora from South Africa, Mali, Botswana, Morocco, Jamaica and Burkina Faso, among other countries.

There's much to like in this beautiful show, but there are a few quirks. The Deans mostly collect figurative work — portraying figures and objects from real life. So, that's the majority of work in the exhibit.

Brooklyn Museum Curator Kimberli Gant didn't want people to assume that Black diaspora artists made only large figurative work, because they don't, so she was sure to include abstract works, sculpture and more.

"I tried to look at 'Giants' as a thesis, look at ways of how could we play with that title," Gant said. "When you say 'giants,' what could people understand of that?"

She organized the show into four sections: "Becoming Giants," "Giant Presence," "Giant Conversation" and "On the Shoulders of Giants."

Before even entering the show, visitors will notice two huge commissioned portraits of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz by artist Kehinde Wiley. Mia had been planning a Wiley show for 2025, but canceled it last summer after the artist was accused of sexual assault.

Alongside the Wiley portraits are a collection of BMX bikes, a prized object from Swizz Beatz's childhood in the South Bronx, and Keys' Yamaha CP-70 electric piano covered with the painted-on words "love" and "freedom."

Inside the show, blasts of color and vibrancy move the energy from room to room, a nice touch brought in by the exhibition's coordinating curator Casey Riley at Mia.

Jamaican-born artist Ebony G. Patterson's large collage of Black children, beads, toys and pink wallpaper is reminiscent of an innocent childhood playroom but also speaks to issues of violence and pain. Hank Willis Thomas' green-and-white-striped fabric square work — "You Shouldn't Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas (LeWitt)" 2017 — is made out of decommissioned prison uniforms and prompts people to think about the invisible, extremely low-paid labor of incarcerated people. Two elegant large-scale portraits encrusted with rhinestones by Mickalene Thomas — "You Can't Turn Me Off (In the Middle of Turning Me On) and "Portrait of Qusuquzah #6" — position Black women in glorious and regal ways.

Among all the bigness, though, some of the smaller and gentler works, like Barkley Hendricks' gorgeous gold-framed landscape paintings of Jamaica and Malick Sidibé's portrait of a young person in Bamako, Mali, after the country's independence from France in 1960, don't shine as much.

The work is all big, which means you're meant to stop and bask in its glory, admiring it in a way almost religious.

Perhaps it is not so much that bigger is better, but rather that bigger is simply louder and demands to be heard.

'Giants: Art From the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys'

When: Ends July 13.

Where: Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 3rd Av. S.

Cost: $16-$20, free for ages 17 and under.

Info: new.artsmia.org or 612-870-3000.