On Thursday, August 15, Solange Knowles sat in one of the subterranean offices at the Guggenheim Museum discussing a new aspect of her everyday life: steady structure. “I’m able to go into my design studio at the same time every day, which is something as a touring artist I never had—a 9-to-5 schedule,” she said. The musician, artist, and creative director’s newfound routine, she says, stems in part from an unexpected source—the tchotchkes she owns, personal items that decorate her home in New York. We’re talking trinkets of all kinds: a clay cross she purchased at a gift shop in New Mexico, her record collection, stacks and stacks of books.
“I started touring at 13, a very young age,” she told W. “It created a nomadic spirit in me that carried on into adulthood. I move around a lot—I’ve lived in seven different cities in the last 15 or so years. But the objects that I possess are a way of grounding me in new spaces.”
Knowles channels that reverence for ephemera in the new short film, Monuments Are Here, which premiered at the Guggenheim that evening. The three-minute short was created and written by Knowles, directed by Nuotama Bodomo, and brought to life via Saint Heron—Knowles’s creative collective—as part of the artist’s partnership with Crown Royal. It stars the legendary musician Grady “Shady” Thomas, member of Parliament and Funkadelic with George Clinton, who shares his own treasure trove of memorabilia, objets d’art, and souvenirs—think African folk art, angel statues, football helmets, and his watch collection (including a timepiece with a diagram of the human body).
The focal point of the short is, without a doubt, Thomas—but the Crown Royal purple bag takes center stage as well since Knowles wanted to “tell its story.” (The musician notes that she personally doesn’t keep a Crown Royal bag at home, “but I have friends who use it in so many different ways. One of them is to hold guitar picks.”) The liquor brand hosted Knowles’s screening, which featured Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz’s daughter, Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, as emcee; along with a series of short films that followed the debut of Monuments Are Here. All of them captured “the art of collecting.” There was an excerpt of Missy Elliott’s MTV Cribs episode, plus a short on Theaster Gates’s collection of vintage Ebony magazines.
Monuments Are Here began with a question, white text typed onto the black screen: what do our objects say about who we are in silence? For Knowles, that clay cross is a very important belonging, one that she carries with her everywhere she goes. “I bought it at the end of a tour of the church in New Mexico,” she said. “There was something pulling me to this cross. Energetically, I felt like if I had this in my life and I could access this on a daily basis, it would make me a better human.
“I think about when I’m not here,” Knowles added. “These immortal objects will get passed on to our loved ones, through generations.”
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