Giants

Last week, I went to see "Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz (a.k.a. Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys" at the High Museum of Art as soon as it opened. The collection, which was first displayed at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year, includes large-scale pieces from more than one hundred Black artists, among them photographer Gordon Parks, painters Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald, and sculptor Kennedy Yanko.

For the Deans, their strategy has been to collect from the heart, but also to collect, respect and protect Black culture.

"So many of the artists that we support and collect have so many powerful stories that they're sharing through their work," Alicia Keys said in the exhibit catalog. "And it's stunning. It's mind-blowing for our kids to be able to see that, learn about that, feel that, even without knowing about it. Genesis is eight years old. He's running around his house, and this is what he sees on the walls. He doesn't know what the backstory is. He has no idea yet, but he knows that he sees himself and it's powerful."

When you emerge from the elevator to see the exhibit, the first things you see are these grand Kehinde Wiley portraits of Swizz Beats and Alicia Keys, full of rich color and detail. As Marvin Gaye plays in the background, you walk past photography that captures Black life in the 1960s and 1970s; paintings that capture protest, pain and celebration; and items that the Deans collected before they became international superstars.

“I just want to show the youth — to show everybody — how to start doing different things with the earnings from their talent," Beatz told Rolling Stone earlier this year. "There’s so much put in front of us: There’s cars, there’s watches, there’s jewelry, there’s a house, and then … you kinda get stuck after that...But imagine if you set a goal and had a purpose for those things, so that everything throughout your career added up to a bigger story. If I could tell my younger self [anything], it would be to take my next steps with purpose, because we don’t get this time back.”

With each piece I saw, the purpose was evident and inspiring. I know I'll go back to see it again, and possibly another time after that, because there was just so much to absorb and just so much to think about in every room. If you're in the Atlanta area, or in the Southeast period, I encourage you to see it too. It will be at the High until January 19, 2025. In the meantime, be sure to check out the exhibit playlist here. It's a good one.

Writing prompt: Think of your happy place. Where is it? Why is it your happy place? Who are you with when you're there? What are you doing? How often do you get to return there in reality, versus in your imagination?

Good Scents

I don't know if this is weird, but I've always been a little fascinated by the people who create beautiful fragrances. I imagine them trying to figure out something like, I don't know, the smell of emerging from the Mediterranean when it's 75 degrees out and citrus blossoms are raining on your head and then some handsome stranger brings you an Aperol Spritz and gently pulls a starfish out of your tangled, sandy mane. Through some sort of olfactory voodoo, they are able to capture the aroma of this citrusy, sunny, sexy (and maybe a little weird) moment, bottle it, and then enlist, say, Natalie Portman to help them sell it to the world via some slick, slow-motion commercial, where she's running in a beautiful gown, maybe, and the light is all golden.

I will always stop what I'm doing to read a story about how and why a perfumer – also known as "nose" – does what he or she does. So of course I stopped to read this fascinating profile of Francis Kurkdjian, who created the cult fragrance Baccarat Rouge 540, which a lot of people love, but some people think smells like Band-Aids, or the dentist's office. Kurkdjian does not want to be thought of as a nose at all. He thinks it's demeaning because he also has a brain and a flair for telling stories with the fragrances he creates. Now at the helm of Parfums Dior, he'll be reimagining some of the house's signature scents and introducing new ones, in an effort to emulate Christian Dior's quote: “Respect tradition and dare to be insolent because one cannot go without the other.”

The Quote I Didn't Know I Needed

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

– from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke.

Endnotes

What I'm watching: "The Money Game" (Amazon Prime), about how the rules allowing student-athletes to profit from name, image, and likeness deals have turned many of them into millionaires before they've even gotten their degree. Also "Slow Horses" (Apple TV+), which is definitely a case of better late than never.

What I'm looking forward to: Brett Goldstein (a.k.a. Roy Kent on "Ted Lasso") at the Fox Theater tomorrow night. Anyone have a favorite Roy Kent moment? I'm not sure if mine is the one where you find out that gruff old Roy once had a "blankie" early in his playing career, the one where Jamie Tartt teaches him how to ride a bike in Amsterdam, or the one where Ted finds out his son Henry was bullied at school and Roy says:

"Best thing you can do with bullies is ignore them. Then you sneak into their house at 4:00 a.m., which, statistically speaking, is the hour people are least prepared to defend themselves. And once you're standing over them, as they sleep in their bed, you start to beat them. With a thick, heavy rope soaked in red paint. Pummeling them over and over until they wake, confusing the paint for their own blood. When they beg you to stop, you laugh as loud as you can, for as long as you can. And then you start to beat them again."

To which Ted replies: "You know, I may just hold off on anything like that until I connect with Michelle and just get the details."

What I might need to do sometime soon: Plan a knitting vacation to Iceland. It's a thing now. Don't believe me? Check out this story in The New York Times.

Where I hope you'll donate this week: The Clean Air Task Force has been working to reduce air pollution since it was founded almost thirty years ago. Among other things, it ran a successful campaign to reduce the pollution caused by coal-fired power plants here, helped limit the American power sector’s CO2 emissions, and helped establish regulations of diesel, shipping, and methane emissions. It has a high success rate, it targets emissions sources that other groups don't, and it is expanding its work around the world. Please, if you can, support what they do with what you can here.