The Secrets of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Museum-Ready Art Collection

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.

Read more at Vanity Fair.