Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys Are Opening an Art and Music Center in Upstate New York to Build ‘a Global Creative Community’

Hip-hop producer Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and
his wife, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Alicia Keys,
have unveiled plans for a new arts center in the sleepy upstate New
York town of Macedon.

Swizz and Keys, who collect artists including Kehinde Wiley,
Nina Chanel Abney, Arthur Jafa, KAWS, and Deana
Lawson, have reportedly been looking for the right venue for
their new Dean Collection Music & Art Campus for quite some time.
But when they saw the former industrial
complex on Macedon’s Route 31 they immediately knew it was
the perfect place, according to the Democrat &
Chronicle.

“[Swizz Beatz] flew in on a helicopter to Canandaigua about a
month ago and took a limousine from Canandaigua to Macedon, got
out, looked at the property and apparently said, ‘This is it; this
is the property I want to buy,’” the couple’s lawyer, Linda Shaw,
told WXXI News. “It’s
an amazing use for the street, because that street was part of the
Underground Railroad and their art collection is an African
American art collection.”

Beatz signed a contract to purchase the land, and the deal is
expected to close in the next two weeks. “We are very excited
about our campus in Macedon,” Swizz Beatz told artnet News, through
a representative. “We are in the early stages of planning so we are
not in a place to share details, but our intention is to continue
to be mindful in building a global creative community.”

Located in Wayne County, less than a half hour’s drive from
Rochester and 70 miles west of Syracuse, Macedon has a population
of just 8,985, according to the Finger Lakes
Times. When Shaw brought plans for the center before
town board members last week, there were audible gasps from the
townspeople in attendance. “There was a wow factor,” town
engineer Scott Allen told local news outlet News10NBC. “That’s
the million-dollar question: Why Macedon?”

Although it might seem unlikely, the deal is “shockingly
real,” Shaw told news station 13WHAM, and the couple
will be touring the property in the coming weeks. She will make a
second presentation to the town planning board on August 19.

The Dean Collection hopes to set up shop in a 110-acre
industrial complex built in the early 1960s. Originally the
Kordite Technical Center, the site served as the Exxon/Mobile
Center before being sold to the Jindal Films Company, which is
based in India. But Jindal moved out in December 2015, and the
property has been on the market since, with the asking price
dropping from $6.3 million to $2.5 million, according to
the Times of Wayne
County. (The property was assessed at $7.8 million in
2016.)

There are three vacant buildings on the property, collectively
measuring 200,000 square feet. The Dean Collection’s plans call for
renovating the main building and converting it into classrooms, a
cafeteria, and office space. The idea, according to the official project
description, is to “educate musicians and artists about the
business side of the music and art industry, and have a campus and
creative atmosphere for learning and expanding opportunities.”

“The long term use of the property, which will likely require
rezoning portions of the 100-acre property to accommodate mixed
uses, is to build dorms and a place for people to live while they
are attending or teaching at the school,” the proposal
continues.

One of the other two buildings will become a performing arts
center with a training area and a gym, the other an exhibition
space and the permanent home for the Dean Collection.
The gallery space, housed in what is now a simple pole barn, will
have regular public viewing hours.

The move follows two high-profile exhibitions of work from the
Dean Collection held earlier this year, at UTA Artist Space in Los Angeles during Frieze Los
Angeles and at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and
African American Art at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University.
The former featured more than 20 contemporary African American
artists, curated by Dean Collection art adviser Nicola Vassell,
while the latter was a show of works by
Civil Rights-era photographer Gordon Parks. (Beatz and Keys boast
the largest privately held collection of Parks’s work.)

The Dean Collection Music & Art Campus appears to be a natural
extension of the work that Swizz Beatz has done with No
Commission, the free art
fair he founded in Miami in 2016. The event has since seen
editions in the Bronx, London, Shanghai, and Berlin. In 2018, the
Dean Collection took that work one step further by giving out
$100,000 to help artists looking to stage their own
exhibitions—$5,000 each to 20 different artists—through
the Dean Collection 20
St(Art)ups initiative.

The deal for the new art center is expected to move quickly. “I
think the Town Board was very excited,” Shaw told WXXI News. “We
got a very positive reception.”

The post Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys Are Opening an Art and
Music Center in Upstate New York to Build ‘a Global Creative
Community’ appeared first on artnet News.