Like most of my projects, it started with a question. Saint Heron started as a need. A call. A cry

turned celebration. Nine years ago, I remember calling my team during the rollout of my True EP. I recognized what I was seeking most was to find community. To find a space that aspired to enrich and expand the world with the nuances, thoughts, and discovery through both my individual and communal identities. It was in that moment, Saint Heron was birthed.

A render, a conduit, an embodiment, an expression, a force, a guide. November 2013.

Saint Heron started as a music and cultural hub and I felt it would be important to create a time capsule of this growing community. I wanted to not only tell these artists' stories, but honor the artists before us who really created the blueprints.  There were a lot of really innovative experimental musical artists really transforming the genre of r&b at the time, and so I curated our eponymous Saint Heron compilation album  featuring 12 artist, who were creating a shift in contemporary music That project featured Kelela, Sampha, and Jhene Aiko, artists who were really emerging and have all made such monumental impacts and contributions to music. 

I wanted these stories to be in the hands of our own. At the time, the loudest voices did not speak like us.

Most of our imprint was digital at the time, and so it became important for us to have personal exchange with the community that we were building, the ones responding to the journey.

Instead of putting the album in record stores, I asked the artist Rashad Newsome, who we commissioned for the album cover, to create an accompanying moving mobile installation, in which we sold records out of the trunk as a nod to Black-owned southern record labels. We started at Studio Museum in Harlem and

traveled throughout the city. The energy felt like we were birthing something necessary. I still have such fond memories of those special days.

The sounds of bass. Missy's Smile when she walked into the temple on St Claude. Bodies dancing in the rain. The strong surviving when Marshall Allen pulled out that Ewi. The humm of the "mmmhmms" in agreement. The birds that kept flocking to Lorna's vessels. The one with a thousand nails. Screaming "Treat Me like Fire,” like we actually wanted to be gasoline. The reverb in the opera house. Holy ghost hands in the air.

This was such an integral shift in the ethos of Saint Heron.  We found that creating community exchange had to be immersive and multidisciplinary. The Saint Heron community became a collective frequency of perspectives seeking personal and communal connection through spirit and vision. From there we began to conceptualize installations, exhibitions, artist collaborations, and creative meccas that really fortified conversations we deemed important to build the legacy of Saint Heron.

World making has become such a really important part of my process and of the projects that have been birthed through Saint Heron. When I started to center the work around what universes I want to leave to future ones like me, the thinking began to shift.

It became irrelevant to create reactive work, and vital to celebrate glory through reimagining space. The glory really shined the most through our artist collaborations and through communal collection.  Some of our first immersive experiences and installations were really living testaments to that.

We collaborated with Jacolby Satterwhite (who created a digital installation for a Met Museum event that we curated) that was soundtracked to tapes his mother used to record thousands of her product design ideas on. This really aligned with our mission to uplift voices of brilliant Black Women whose stories need to be amplified louder and louder. Through our artist talks we were able to take these mutually connected cornerstones of culture that we may all be inspired by, and not only celebrate them, but dig even deeper into the processes of these creations. I remember us watching the footage back from our artist talk with Julie Dash, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, and Arthur Jafa and realizing those stories were intended to stay in that room with the people present. So much of our work became about preserving the collective energy in a single moment in time.  We started to transition into showcasing spatial exhibitions, performance pieces, films by experimental emerging filmmakers, culinary experiences that focused on fellowship and personal communion, but we also just created room for joy through events like our PROCLAMATION! Series. We invited people to write a proclamation of what they wanted to leave behind through a night of dancing, before entering the space. We then archived those notes and shared them anonymously on the site which gave them new lives for others. It was also such an honor getting to showcase the more intimate sides of artists, like the late Barkley Hendricks and Lynette Yiadom- Boakye who curated a playlist for our Wine and Grind Series. I can't wait for us to

revisit these archives. So many people have asked what exactly Saint Heron is, being that we operate with so many facets, and the answer is, Saint Heron is an embodiment; and through all of these experiences, authentic fellowship is birthed. Our community is a living testament to the glory of expression, and how that recharges and reaffirms what we hold for our own cultural and artistic worth.

The work is never done.The work is never doooonnnneee. It just looks different, at different times. The work becomes a different work, work of a different kind. The work is never done.

For so long I was disillusioned by finding the perfect physical space, and wanting to work on a scale that we just didn’t have the resources to. I recognized these constructs that had drilled in me that perfectionism is key, and that we can't present ourselves or our work to the world unless it’s in its most fully realized pristine presentation of excellence. I'm off that. Saint Heron is off that. We are now focused on building on our own time, space, and process, and the vulnerability that the process is the work. We want to be transparent about that and showing that. At times we didn't have it all figured out. It wasn't always cute, and balancing our lofty ambitions with our personal or other professional lives would sometimes take a toll.

We needed just a moment to sit in silence and really just think and conjure.

They demolished  Augusta's "The Harp"! The nerve! The tragedy! but..... The Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts lives on. Selma joined her! Studio Z lives on. Linda Goode Bryant teaches us. The "Where we at" collective says heyyyy.  I am grateful for these blueprints. 

I think a standout moment was the realization that there are so many incredible collectives and hubs and communities led by phenomenal Black and Brown people, specifically Black women, that are currently doing the work with so much power. These spaces exist, and so beautifully! There are so many places to find your tribe, and we truly feel deep gratitude and appreciation for the way that we have learned from these spaces. These communities teach us. We have found  a greater understanding of ourselves through them. And we are so thankful for that.

I truly feel that when your mission has been serviced, or your questions have been answered, 

it is time to ask new ones and evolve. It took me a while to just incubate and say, what is our purpose now? As we transitioned to an institution, the answer and the vision became reimagining the urgency in building and preserving collections and archives of our own artists’ works and stories. Our vision is to build a space that engages and protects radical conceptual imaginings across all facets of art, music, culture, and design.

We are dedicated to becoming historians of our own expressions. We want to open up these works publicly, and make them accessible to students, our communities of creatives and collectors for research and engagement, so that the works intergenerationally belong and grow with us. This had a lot to do with my curiosity on which collectors will continue to pass on our histories and stories to their great grandchildren, and will they look like the works? Where will our great grandchildren need to go to access the work of such important artists, and who will they, perhaps, have to stand amongst to see these images and works - work that resembles them, their likeness and their features.

Through Saint Heron we will be creating a permanent collection of fine and contemporary art, sculptures, and objects. It will also consist of stories and artifacts outside of the art world, collections we find essential to share with future generations decades from now. We want

Saint Heron to be a resource where the children of the future can research art, design, and communication. Shout out Michigan. Shout out the architecture we dwelled in, the four of us, answering the questions. Pondering. Throwing out ideas and catching them. Shout out CC, Shantel, and Sabla. Shout out that gas station wine we toasted to the new Saint Heron. It was way too sweet. Way too hot. Them bees tried to tear that ass up. Those drives were nice. Kalamazoo is such a funny set of syllables on the tongue.

During a recent trip to Detroit, I visited the Techno museum and left there so incredibly inspired and moved and reignited. The gallery wasn’t very large in scale, but it had such a colossal impact on me, in that I was actually able to feel and breathe the story of this birth of a universe built by these black founders of a new genre through the preservation of their collections. As history tried to write them out, these artifacts, big and small, created their own technology as a birth of a new Blackness that will live on forever.

I also visited the Dabls Mbad African Bead Museum, which put so much in context for me. It really helped me to imagine a way of blurring the lines of the Gallery and Museum. With these beads, you were able to leave with something displayed, but it holds the history and the spiritual weight of the oldest trading systems on the continent of Africa.

I felt so inspired in that moment to re-think all the ways I was what was holding Saint Heron back from really transitioning and growing into the space it is intended to be. Over the past few years our processes and projects have really taught

us so many valuable lessons. For a long time Saint Heron was just a team of three, myself, my dearest friend and sculptor Armina Mussa, and my former God-sent project manager NyAsia.

The three of us worked so closely, and to be honest, so tirelessly. We taught ourselves so much along the way. When Nike or Google or The Whitney reached out to us to collaborate, we were not only curating and building these experiences, we were physically building sets, personally checking in guests, while managing the 300-piece marching band that was performing.

Our dreams were the bandwidth.

But this was all so important to us in creating a universe, and the space around it became just as important then the experience itself. From the scenic design, to the graphic design of the invite, we set out to create intentionally through new visual languages. My work as an art director, and creative director is really precious to me. It’s an avenue to create a force that translates identity, spirit, and dynamism through the communication of design. 

Over time whether it be through album artwork or stage design or performance pieces, I've always tried to create visual work that encompasses expressions my other works can not communicate. So the next evolution is for Saint Heron to be able to extend this work through a wider scope of collaborations and projects.

One of our recent agency projects, the Parsons School of Fashion "Here and Now" festival, was such a powerful movement of all of these facets of design and technology coming together to create a unique and moving experience for the graduating class that showcased their work. Those moments are truly special, and a rendering of what we are setting

out to achieve. The future truly is bright. Our northern star has arrived.

We have such an exciting inaugural season that includes our new digital dossier which focuses on publishing the works of really strong literary voices and commissioning and showcasing original work of artists, photographers, designers, and artisans through a series of virtual exhibitions. We want to house and honor these creations as the indispensable expressions they are. Through this Dossier we

want to invite a meditation on consumption by giving these important stories and creations time and intentionality to be lived and interacted with. We want people to revisit and re-engage. So each exhibition will live one at a time until we bring them back, seasonally, through our archives. We are also launching our Saint Heron library of rare edition artist and poetry books which will be open and free to the public for research projects.  One of the projects I'm really excited about is The Charles Stepney Project. We’ve been able to recover and archive 100 physical unprinted tape reels found in the basement of composer Charles Stephney’s home, by his three daughters. We have also amassed quite an archive of precious images and home videos from Womack and Womack, which is a story so important to us. The archive takes us through their travels through more than 9 countries while they homeschooled their seven children and continued making albums. This one is personally  important to me, as I feel black women need more access to stories where they can see themselves in unconventional radical family units as they begin building their own. We also are extremely excited about relaunching our gallery, Small Matter, which will house our new inaugural art and design collection, and artist in residency program. Small Matter previously released tactile objects by young artisans of color, and is looking forward to continuing to refurbish the historical conditions of ceramics by preserving our connection to the African-originating practice of forming vessels from mud and clay, but is expanding vastly through new studio works, printed matter, and design collaborations.  We have been working really hard to create a range of works that demonstrate sculptural and architectural language through a series of really exciting design objects. These works range from large and small scale functional sculpture, architectural forms, lighting design, and more. Some of them I have personally designed exclusively for Small Matter, and some are designs from other artists in our orbit. Through Small Matter, we have been really inspired by the origins of Techno and are really excited to explore futurism through design and as a necessary cultural expression to embody a vehicle for the pneuma of technology. But we really see

technology less as a computerized mechanic of virtuality and more as a present force that encompasses light, color, movement, shape, speed, scale, and process.  Every expression is a concentration of energy that translates the space Saint Heron is building.Every expression is a concentration of energy that translates the space Saint Heron is building.

I can't say it enough, Saint Heron is truly a community.  I feel so incredibly blessed to have such an incredible team who all really bring every facet of the vision to life. I feel like we learn so much from each other, respect each other's contributions and insights so much, and that's invaluable.

There's a tremendous amount of trust here that I hold very dearly. Saint Heron is not the Solange Project, and was never intended to be. As you learn more about our incredible team, I really look forward to experiencing all of our individual voices through this work. 

If you are reading this and you have been a part of the journey of saint heron, big or small, I want to thank you for coming along this ride with us. There are no words to thank you for your spirits, support, and all of the ways you have personally helped us to grow. For making us feel less alone. For being a voice when I simply couldn’t find the words, or the energy. For encouraging us. For dressing up in emeralds, and for being the last one to leave when the lights came on. For truly making this the space that it has become. We look forward to this next chapter, and can't wait to share with you in all of these creations. Thank you for making this a space where we don’t have to fill in the blanks, for understanding what is not always spoken. All of our projects are bricks Saint Heron Heron adds to history's foundation for tomorrow's imagined heights.