It’s just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday night, and the line to get into the Surrogate’s Court is filled with people in Tabi flats, platform Timberlands, fur coats with tufted, voluminous collars and Telfar bags. The building typically serves as an office to deal with the wills and belongings New Yorkers leave behind, but tonight, it’s the scene of Solange Knowles’s Saint Heron book launch.
The zine, published through Saint Heron, Knowles’s multidisciplinary cultural agency and art institute, centers on the life and legacy of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black and queer architect, educator, and Sag Harbor community developer. Meredith founded the arts department at Virginia State University in 1935 and finished her first building in 1939 at a time when she was one of the country’s few female Black architects. Tonight, more than 1,000 copies of Saint Heron’s zine are slated to be loaned out to guests. The only ask is that they return the copies to either the Studio Museum in Harlem or the Brooklyn Public Library within 55 days.
“We started the research for this book five years ago at the height of the pandemic and had a lot of early limitations with accessing her archives because a lot of libraries and archives across the country were closed. However, we ended up knocking on the doors of her church home and reaching out to the Eastville community Center in Sag Harbor, and VSU was so incredibly gracious and supportive of this project and provided a number of letters, postcards, documents of her teachings, and blueprints,” Knowles says. “I feel like we’ve been able to live with the evidence of her trajectory for so long. Over the course of working on this zine, we all became so intensely close to her spirit, her life, and the imaginings of how she lived and loved and existed.”
Inside the court, pianist Precious Renee Tucker plays a few notes on her keyboard, and the sound reverberates off the smooth patterned-marble floors and ornate domed ceiling, where the molding mimics ribbons and draped fabrics. On display on long white tables and covered in museum casing is a selection of books that Knowles has curated. They are all archival — Coal by Audre Lorde, Civil Wars by June Jordan, Black Woman Sorrow by Rosa Borgar, Clay’s Ark by Octavia Butler. Books that are, as Tanaya Chambers, an attendee for the evening, observed, “inclusive of all the possibilities of Blackness.”
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Tables flank the room, where women dressed in black hand out sign-up sheets for guests to borrow a copy of the book. Renee Campbell, a guest who tells me she’s been a fan of Knowles and her work since 2012, is relishing in the celebration of physical media tonight. “Now, everyone’s on the cloud. Everything is on a server. You lose sight of what’s real,” Campbell says. “What’s real is what we can see, what we can touch, what we can hold.”
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Samatha Scoggins, an attendee who had been at the front of the line, came out tonight in part to admire these archival copies. “Young Black people, our generation, have an interest in going back to these books because they hold so much knowledge,” she says. “I love reading Audre Lorde and James Baldwin. All these works that were so predictive of our time.”
The notion is something Knowles had in mind when curating the evening. “Over the past few years, Saint Heron has really emphasized the importance of tangible artifacts. I think I have a lot of fear that over time, and in this digital age, that the physical expressions of all of this may get lost,” she says. “There’s also nothing like being able to completely silence the world around you and immerse yourself into a story, and so often when engaging with the digital places we consume so much of our information, we get distracted.”
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Well into the evening, the room has become a salon of sorts, where I overhear guests introducing themselves to one another, sharing recommendations — Campbell suggests a rewatch of Succession, in part to notice the art references sprinkled throughout, like when Greg and Tom drape napkins over their heads and how similar the frame looks to Rene Magritte’s “The Lovers.” Others recommend picking up familiar books. “The best thing I read this year was Robin D.G. Kelley’s foreword to Black Marxism,” a guest named Taylor, told me. She suggests, though, that I should give The Color Purple a reread first as we head into the winter months. Her friend, Magali, recommends The Giver. “It has ambiguity, and it forces you to use a lot of imagination. In the winter months, if we can’t go outside, we have to create the image in our heads.”
On a nearby balcony overlooking the room, Knowles is smiling as Tucker plays a song on the keyboard. Earlier in the evening, I’d spotted her leaning over a railing, taking photos of the event on her phone. She’s wearing a sheer black Ferragamo dress, pointed-toe heels, and a sleek side part into cascading waves and is surrounded by friends including Telfar Clemens and a glowing Aweng Ade-Chuo. Knowles applauds and whoops as Tucker’s performance concludes. It’s evident the evening’s launch has energized her. “I was the teenager reading everything I could to further my education as a GED recipient, and books of all kinds have played an immeasurable role for me in my better understanding of the world around me,” she says. “I have been enjoying so much spending a lot of the past five years learning more and more about book-making, from binding to printing techniques, and it’s been incredibly fulfilling to exercise that part of my brain. Saint Heron Press has published five books over the past five years and is gearing up to release four more over the next two years with this expansion of tools. It really is such a joy for me.”
