BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Swizz Beatz And Alicia Keys Want You To Go To Harvard To Learn About Gordon Parks

This article is more than 4 years old.

Melissa Blackall

Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and his wife Alicia Keys don’t exactly remember the first time they came across the work of photographer Gordon Parks. That’s completely understandable because the photographer’s images—which span from fashion to portraits of life during the Civil Rights Movement—were intertwined within the pages of magazines like Life, for which he took countless pictures, including the 1950 cover of baseball player Jackie Robinson and wrote and shot a feature for the 1968 story “The Negro and the Cities”; or Vogue, for which he shot swan-like models in the latest couture from Paris. And then there that the photos that have somehow become part of the zeitgeist of the time, like his 1942 rendition of “American Gothic,” featuring a black cleaning woman holding a mop and broom before an American flag, or the 1952 “Emerging Man,” which depicts a man coming out of a manhole, inspired by Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man.

Copyright and courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation

Dean recalls being cognizant of Parks’s work around the age of 18, but he remembers being exposed to the photos by flipping through magazines. Keys recalls having a similar experience. “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. “And so it's so amazing with something become the fabric of a culture, that you can't even separate the moment that you recognize it and not because it's been a part of you and for your whole life.”

The couple became so moved by Parks’s work that connected with the Gordon Parks Foundation, and began collecting it, acquiring one, then another, and after a few years, they amassed the largest private collection of Gordon Parks photographs, which they are presenting for the first time in public at Dean’s alma mater at the The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University. Titled Gordon Parks: Selections From the Dean Collection, the exhibition—which is on view through July 19th, 2019—opened in conjunction with Harvard scholar Sarah Lewis’s Vision & Justice conference on April 25 and 26.

Copyright and courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation

“We never look at works as purchases, we looked at them as welcome to the family, and partnerships of our partners, so that was a great place to do it to continue the legacy that they're building,” said Dean. “And we're partners in that.”

Continuing Parks’s legacy is important to Dean and Keys. Seeing here tonight that there's a greater conversation about where we are as young people in a world that's ever changing, and how we're pushing our conversation forward.” said Keys. “In a in an institution that's supposed to be about the highest learning that you could possibly have. And inclusive, is crazy powerful.”

“And to add on to that,” emphasized Dean, “the public can come see as well.”

“He is the most powerful artists that ever lived,” said Keys. “And the reason why he was so powerful is because he took his own life experience, and never let there be any ceilings before him—even in a time where they were the most was the most separation, the most ceilings that we're trying to be placed upon him. He never allowed that to stop his expression. And when he says that he uses his camera as a weapon, against discrimination, against racism, against poverty against the situations, the issues, and the problems that we all deal with. And you know, is, to me, the epitome of what art is made for.”  

Copyright and courtesy of The Gordon Parks Foundation

The images span from Parks’s numerous photographs as he followed legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, to the riveting images that showed the brutal divide of segregation to photos of life in poverty, to a portrait of artist Alberto Giacometti. Dean said one of Ali driving a group in a convertible Cadillac with the top down in South Beach resonates with him the most. “When you have leaders that go so high, like him, we don't have to take time off and to have fun,” said Dean. “He was really having fun that day. He wasn't working that day, he was really enjoying his guys and pulled out his Cadillac, and he's on South Beach like. I'm feeling the breeze.”

For Keys, it was the photographs of life in poverty in Harlem and Brazil that moved her the most. “That was such a powerful statement of how it doesn't matter where we're from, where we live— our issues are the same,” she said. “You know, and so therefore, we are each other. And that was something powerful that Peter [Kunhardt Jr., executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation] quoted that Gordon Parks said, like, I am you and you are me.”

The couple also revealed that Dean had naysayers when he earned his certificate from Harvard’s Owner/President Management Program. “People was mad at me,” said Dean. “He broke down this barrier, broke down this fake thing that's been placed around us that education is not cool,” said Keys. “It really showed people that is that everything is possible, and that a kid from the South Bronx can do anything.”

“The sky is not the limit, it’s just a view,” said Dean.