A St. Paul GIANT: Gordon Parks plays a special role in the new Mia exhibition from Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz
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The exhibition “GIANTS" at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is an explosion of color, texture and emotion. The show travels to Mia from the Brooklyn Museum in New York, which premiered this showcase of the Dean Collection, owned by music industry couple Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz (né Kasseem Daoud Dean).
“GIANTS” features about 100 artworks by Black diasporic artists, past and present, across several galleries with major works from big art names like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mickalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Lorna Simpson and Nick Cave, the American artist known for vibrant, sculptural costumes. Cave will give an artist talk April 6.
The exhibition also has a special local connection: a gallery dedicated to Gordon Parks, the renowned photographer, filmmaker and poet who went to high school in St. Paul. (And now there is a St. Paul high school named after him.) Parks died in 2006.
Parks’ niece, Robin Hickman-Winfield, still lives in Minnesota. As a young man, Parks left St. Paul for Chicago, and then New York, and became the first Black staff photographer at Life Magazine and a civil rights activist.
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“I knew how important it was to foreground his legacy here in the Twin Cities,” says Casey Riley, chair of global contemporary art and curator of photography and new media at Mia. Riley also worked on the 2024 Mia exhibition, “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.”
“There's such a circle of recognition around his contributions to not just photography,” Riley said, “but the artistic communities of our region that it felt important to let him have his moment in the show.”
The Dean Collection is the largest private holding of works by Parks. Keys spoke to Forbes in 2019 about seeing Park’s photography for the first time as a young person.
“You don’t realize that these powerful images of Muhammad Ali are Gordon Parks, you don't realize that this beautiful iconic image of the Muslim women standing is Gordon Parks, you don’t realize that the woman with her daughter in front of the movie theater is Gordon Parks, but you've seen it so many times through through movies and films and advertisers and pictures in places,” said Keys.
In 2024, The Gordon Parks Foundation, based in New York, gave the couple the Gordon Parks Patron of the Arts Award.
“Mr. and Mrs. Dean are very close to the Gordon Parks Foundation. They're big supporters of his legacy and they've been working for a long time to build a vast collection of his work,” Riley says.
The intimate gallery dedicated to Parks is a coda to the show, positioned right before the exit under the subheading “On the Shoulders of Giants.”
There are about 18 photos, black and white and color, featuring Parks’ wide range of subject matter, from the daily life of Black communities to fashion photography (seen in this exhibit in a image of the supermodel Iman) to his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement with images of Malcom X, Muhammad Ali and Black Panther leaders Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver.
“I was thinking about how vast his photographic practice was over the decades. He wasn't just a photographer, he was an author, he was a filmmaker,” Riley says. “What we see in ‘GIANTS’ is, his studio practice, his portraiture, the humanistic way in which he engaged with different sitters across time and at the same time, we also see his interest in government and his interest in the politics of the different eras through which he lived. He was deeply concerned with civil rights and was himself an activist.”
“GIANTS” is on view through July 13. Minneapolis arts organization Public Functionary will host a series of events at Mia about the exhibition beginning March 20.
