Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and Alicia Keys have been buying art in significant and increasingly strategic ways since they found early success as a hip-hop producer and an R&B star respectively. At first they wanted art to decorate his home, but, as he learned and explored more, he turned to thinking about different ways he could build a serious collection of contemporary art.

Dean and his wife, the singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, have since 2005 focused passionately on collecting the work of African-American artists as a way to help build “a beautiful community where everyone gets what they deserve,” as Dean told Antwaun Sargent in a profile for ARTnews’s Fall 2019 issue.

As collectors, Dean and Keys look to engage with the living artists that they emerge, which range from emerging to mid-career and established. But one recent acquisition, a gift from Keys to Dean on Father’s Day, made them the owners of the largest collection in private hands of work by Gordon Parks, the photographer whose work ran the gamut of fashion photography to documenting the Civil Rights movement. Earlier this year their collection of Parks image was the subject of an exhibition at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The legacy that Gordon Parks represents is something we can relate to,” Keys told Sargent. “The largest collection of Gordon Parks’s work—I think that’s an important statement. That’s something my husband talks about a lot: we have to collect our culture.”

Here's a look at some of the works in their collection.