Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s art collection is hanging at Newfields, and the ticket covers the whole campus. “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” fills the contemporary galleries at the Indianapolis Museum of Art with 134 works by Black artists, from Gordon Parks photographs to an Arthur Jafa sculpture nearly 8 feet tall, through Feb. 28, 2027. Adults pay $29, youth 6 to 17 pay $20, and general admission to the galleries, the gardens and Lilly House is included. It is organized by the Brooklyn Museum, where it first showed in 2024.
What Is in Giants
The couple, who built the collection over two decades, named the show for three kinds of giants: the legends, the contemporary artists widening the canon and the works that are physically huge. The first room, “On the Shoulders of Giants,” has Esther Mahlangu’s big, bright paintings in the Ndebele house-painting tradition of South Africa, street photographs by Gordon Parks and Jamel Shabazz and works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Barkley L. Hendricks and Ernie Barnes.
“Giant Conversations” is the room that asks the most of a viewer. Lorna Simpson’s “Tense” (1991) is about who gets to define how Black women are seen, and Nick Cave’s textured sculptures are about the costumes Black men put on to stay safe. Henry Taylor and Jerome Lagarrigue paint protest and homelessness. The same room swings to joy: more than a dozen Shabazz photographs of New Yorkers from the 1980s on, a Hassan Hajjaj portrait of Moroccan henna artists and Amy Sherald’s two-panel painting of Baltimore dirt-bike riders, a passion Swizz shares as a BMX collector.
The finale, “Giant Presence,” is where the scale lands. Nina Chanel Abney’s “Catfish” (2017) is a cartoon-bright scene about sex and money, Arthur Jafa’s “Big Wheel I” (2018) is a nearly 8-foot wheel wrapped in chains, and Titus Kaphar and Meleko Mokgosi paint at a size that fills a wall. Kehinde Wiley, who painted Barack Obama’s presidential portrait, is here too.
A word for parents bringing kids along: youth tickets exist, and most of the show is portraits, photographs and painting that children can look at with you. A few pieces deal with violence, exploitation and sexual exchange, and the wall text says so plainly. Read the room before you turn a 9-year-old loose in it.
Giants at Newfields: Tickets, Hours and Parking
- Where: Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis, in the Penny and Jock Fortune Suite of Contemporary Galleries
- Dates: through Feb. 28, 2027
- Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; also open Mondays Nov. 23, Dec. 21 and Dec. 28, 2026
- Tickets: $29 adults, $25 seniors 65 and up, $20 ages 6 to 17, free 5 and under; members $15 and $11; Access Pass $10. The ticket includes general admission to all of Newfields.
- Parking: free, in the surface lot and the underground garage
On First Thursdays, Nov. 5 and Dec. 3, 2026, general admission is pay what you wish from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Giants drops to $20 for adults and $15 for youth that day, and the galleries close at 5 p.m., so plan the lights for after. The Access Pass price applies to families in Indiana assistance programs who show the card and an Indiana ID. Newfields’ own garage has a new mural painted for the show by Indianapolis artist Nathaniel Johnson, who works as modestartwerks, so the exhibition starts before you reach the elevator.
Making a Night of It
From Nov. 20, 2026, to Jan. 3, 2027, Winterlights turns the gardens outside the galleries into a walk through nearly 2 million lights, with tickets from $25 and kids 5 and under free. Winterlights is a separate ticket from Giants, but the two sit on the same campus, so an afternoon in the galleries can run straight into the lights after dark. For a daytime version with the kids, the museum’s Star Studio spaces are hands-on on every floor, and the 24 Indianapolis museums for kids guide has the rest of the city’s options, prices and free days. If the budget is the question, our list of free things to do in Indianapolis with kids explains how First Thursdays at Newfields work.
