The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts feels like a big high school on a Wednesday morning — complete with fire drill.

“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” opens on Saturday, but approximately 400 students from assorted high schools and colleges are getting a sneak peek at the much-hyped exhibit (after a brief pause following a fire scare). They have packed the VMFA to marvel at the large-scale art featured in the show — paintings, photos, textiles, sculptures, installations, even a “sound suit” — and to gather for a pep rally afterward in the museum’s Leslie Cheek Theater.

No one told them that the power couple behind all of this art, DJ and producer Kasseem Dean (a.k.a. Swizz Beatz) and his wife, 17-time-Grammy winning singer Alicia Cook Dean, better known as Alicia Keys, would be in attendance to greet them. But the appearance wasn’t much of a secret  — the couple had been at a $100 a ticket pre-show party the night before at the VMFA — but the roar was deafening when they stepped onstage to the pounding rhythms of the All-City RPS DrumLine. “Remember who you are,” Keys told one young questioner who asked her about how to succeed through adversity. “Take the time to hear yourself, to know what you want and what you don’t want. Not your friends, not Instagram, not Tik Tok. Know what you want.”

The glitzy party and inspiring pep rally fully illustrated the positive power of celebrity. But the spectacle also begged the question: Is “Giants” just an exhibition of some cool art that the Deans acquired and have hanging in their New York home, or is it a cohesive, singular assembly that stands alone as its own artistic statement?

Kimberli Gant anticipates the question.

“I understand we’re in a moment where people are focused on celebrities using many ways to brand themselves,” says the Brooklyn Museum of Art modern and contemporary art curator who helped to coordinate the exhibit. “But the Deans are artists who are supporting other artists and using their more wide-ranging platform to provide opportunities for them.”

“I think these are two creative individuals who have seen the real power of creative expression,” echoes Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator of modern and contemporary art at VMFA. “I think people will see works in this collection and be absolutely gobsmacked. Because it’s really extraordinary work.”

Indeed. As the students discovered, this is an exhibit filled with slack-jaw “oh wow” moments. “How did she even think of that?” one high school girl marveled as she posed for a selfie in front of a huge Ebony Patterson tableaux festooned in pink, incorporating Digital images, beads, appliqués, fabric, glitter, buttons, costume jewelry, trimming, rhinestones and crayons. “I’d love to do something like this,” gushed her friend.

“Giants” brings together 130 pieces from the Deans’ personal collection — roughly 1/10th of what they hold — and focuses on the work of 38 distinguished Black artists, most still living, from all over the world, including Patterson, Gordon Parks, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, Nick Cave, Barkley L. Hendricks, and Jamel Shabazz, among others. The couple didn’t just acquire wall hangings when they purchased these pieces, the curators say, they also forged lasting ties with the artists.

“[The Deans] actually support these artists in ways large and small,” Oliver says. “They continue their relationships with them and they have created platforms for these artists. So it’s not just transactional. In other words, they didn’t just accumulate a bunch of stuff and want the world to see it.”

Collecting From the Heart

“My strategy is collecting from the heart,” Kasseem Dean told Gant in a recorded interview when the show first opened in Brooklyn last year. “You know, a lot of people call us ‘Black collectors.’ We’re art collectors. We happen to be Black, but we’re art collectors. We collect artists from all over the world. We don’t look at art [and ask] ‘What color is this artist?’ My first thing is how did this person make something so beautiful? The reason why we double down on artists of color, Black and brown, is because our own community wasn’t collecting these giants.”

Working with Gant, the Deans have organized the exhibition in thematic sections. “It’s not, oh, these are all Black artists and let’s just throw them out there,” Oliver says. “They are framed in a way that’s really beautiful.”

The first section, Becoming Giants, illustrates how the Deans established their aesthetic. The first thing one encounters are two stunning Kehinde Wiley portraits of the duo, placed next to personal artifacts with deep meaning to the collectors, such as BMX bikes, turntables, Kool Herc speakers and a Yamaha CP-70 electric piano stenciled with “Love” and “Freedom.”  This leads into the second section, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, which features some of the elder states people in the exhibition — established figures such as Parks, Hendricks, Kwame Brathwaite and Esther Mahlangu.

The third section is called Giant Conversations. “That’s divided into two subsections,” Oliver points out. “One is called Celebrating Blackness, which documents the beauty of the culture, the beauty of the people, and there’s one called Critiquing Society, which brings in all kinds of questions around how people are framed, through police brutality, homelessness, all the things that one would expect from the post-African colonial and independence moment.”

The last section is called Giant Presence, she adds. “That is really looking at the monumentality of art, but also just the sort of extraordinary breadth of art that’s being created.”

“Giants” doesn’t just refer to the talent of the artists, but of the art itself. Most of these pieces are outsized — the large patterned paintings by Mahlangu, the epic Derrick Adams collages, and Nick Cave’s foreboding “sound suit” mannequin — take over the gallery spaces, impossible to ignore or brush by.

In the Brooklyn Museum interview, Keys said that what separates the couple from other collectors is that they are also artists.  “I think as creative people, creative beings, who understand what it takes to make something out of nothing, what it takes to create a vision that nobody could see before you actually executed it, and how important that is to be able to uphold that, respect that, admire that, and really support that.”

The collection spotlights Black artists who have been historically underrepresented in major galleries, and attempts to rectify that. Curator Gant, in the Atlanta Voice, explained that “Giants” was an “expansive presentation of art history that often is not taught in the giant catalogs that we get when we’re studying in school.” On Wednesday, she reiterated that thought. “I think the artists in this show are probably not as familiar to many of the visitors as we would like. And so this is an opportunity to really expand people’s knowledge of art and art practice.”

One of her favorites, and one that the kids seemed to marvel at the most, is an epic wall-filling painting by Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi. “Every time I see it, it renews me,” the curator says. “There is so much commentary in every panel of that painting that I’m in awe of it. It’s a painting that tries to investigate democratic principles within southern Africa. I mean, it’s a monumental work and a monumental conversation.”

After “Giants” opened at the Brooklyn Museum last year, it traveled to the High Museum in Atlanta, Georgia and then the Minneapolis Institute of Art in Minnesota. The VMFA will be its fourth venue. Oliver says that many of the artists featured, 16 in fact, have works already housed in the VMFA’s permanent collection. A separate exhibit in the 21st Century Gallery, “Giants at the VMFA, showcases many of those pieces.

“We’re drawing bridges to what’s in our collection,” Oliver says. “So If you love the Deborah Roberts [art] featured in this exhibition, go upstairs to the second floor and see our beautiful Deborah Roberts. If you love Gordon Parks, if you love Jamel Shabazz, go upstairs and see what we have by them. Sometimes when people see special exhibitions, they’re like, ‘man, it’s so great that this work is here.’ But we’re like, ‘yeah, but it is already here.’ It lives here.”

“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” opens to the public on Saturday, Nov. 22 and runs through March 2026 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Admission is $12.