Jump to content
Solange Knowles, with long dark hair, poses in a black mesh top and dark skirt against a white background

Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles stands with arms crossed, wearing a black tube top and wide-leg pants, in a white room

Solange pushes artistic boundaries in music, performance, and visual art.

Over the last ten years, the artist has transitioned her sculptural practice in stage and scenic design into informing a desire to move beyond the restrictions of performance and into artistic forms that allow her to fully engage with audiences one-to-one. Her first full-scale sculpture, Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube) (2018), for the Hammer Museum, sparked an interest in creating both large scale monuments for occupancy and evolved into more intimate forms such as her resin and C-print piece, titled Orion’s Rise (2024), for The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now.

Initially developed for her 2019 piece In Past Pupils and Smiles for the 58th La Biennale di Venezia, but left unfinished due to time constraints and the catastrophic floods, her latest sculptural project is her most ambitious yet: a public sculpture exhibition designed to charge electrical conductivity through form and survey the shift in material over time when interacting with light, touch, and human energy. Solange has contemplated public sculpture as a means to extend performance to the viewer, but through the everyday, mundane gestures of occupancy.

She imagines the sculpture being in conversation with quiet contemplation, a study of a sunset, dialogue between two people, a backdrop for reading, or simply to exist amongst. Solange has taken additional inspiration from The High Line itself, pulling from the materiality and textures of the environment in which the sculpture is placed.

Solange Knowles’s
Public Sculpture

Get inspired by Solange’s process and the steps she takes to realize her vision.

Solange Knowles's architectural sculpture blueprint shows three geometric forms with dimensions, including a sphere on a ramp

Fabrication Renders

Fabrication Renders

The artist uses live render sessions to refine proportion studies and explore scale and material within sculpture schematics using 3D software.

Solange Knowles' architectural sculpture sketch features a geometric, open-sided structure with a framed window and horizontal lines

Original Sketch

Original Sketch

“I have very, very, clear visions of the spirits that I want to bring to life through my work. A lot of times it starts with a sketch. I am not the best drawer, but the meditative practice of defining lines and symmetry and geometry has been very grounding to the noise in my mind and is the foundation for the objects I see in my imagination.”

— Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles' clear glass sculpture, resembling a Ferris wheel, sits on a wooden surface before a window

Saint Heron’s Small Matter Art Objects: Decanter 001

Saint Heron’s Small Matter Art Objects: Decanter 001

The sphere is a very sacred shape in Solange's practice, as seen here in a hand-blown glass decanter from Saint Heron's Small Matter Art Objects collection.

Solange Knowles, with long dark hair, hangs an architectural drawing on a corkboard filled with other design sketches

Hand-Drawn Sketches

Hand-Drawn Sketches

Research is a critical part of Solange's process, both online and offline, in the form of printed references as well as her own sketches done in graphite and pen.

Solange Knowles holds a glass sculpture in a gallery with African masks and a glass table

Saint Heron Studio

Saint Heron Studio

“Ideating in the Saint Heron studio is incredibly useful as a resource for materiality. I love working with materials that come from the earth and seeing the transition of a material like glass evolve from dust and fire to form. Working amongst the Ekoi masks, which are materialized with so many layers of living matter into these phenomenal spirited sculptures is a huge compass for me.”

— Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles' unfinished sculpture features clear glass objects and a yellow orb on a black and wood table

Resin Prototype 1

Resin Prototype 1

This prototype helped Solange to imagine the functionality within the fabrication process by imagining a removable orb affixed in the middle of the form.

Solange Knowles's "Unfinished Sculpture" features a clear glass sphere and architectural elements on a glass table

Resin Prototype 2

Resin Prototype 2

“Resin is my material first love. It is always very helpful to imagine the form first in transparency and with luminosity. It's how I mirror myself within the form.”

— Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles' unfinished glass sculptures: a translucent yellow cube and a tall, pointed prism

Solange’s First Self-Cured Resin Studies

Solange’s First Self-Cured Resin Studies

Solange's first self-casted resin form studies from 2020.

A six-panel grid shows Solange Knowles's process of creating an unfinished glass and architectural sculpture

Solange’s Silicone Molds

Solange’s Silicone Molds

“During the pandemic, I used Chrome to research how to create my own molds and cure my own resin form studies. These first forms I created were the foundation for me to continue to build more in depth ideas with more complex shapes and geometry.”

— Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles, wearing a bandana and work boots, uses a jigsaw to cut wood for her unfinished architectural sculpture

Solange’s Plexiglass Models

Solange’s Plexiglass Models

“I used plexiglass to create my own early models of the sculptures. Doing this on my own, at this scale, helped me to understand and map out where seams needed to be in the fabrication process knowing that I wanted the copper sheets to appear as monolithic as possible while honoring the functionality of the material being easier to work with in large sheets.”

— Solange Knowles

Two rectangular copper sheets, possibly for Solange Knowles' architectural sculpture, lie diagonally on a light gray surface

Copper Sheet Samples

Copper Sheet Samples

“One of the things that excites me about working with copper, is the idea of both human to material charge, and material to human charge. This idea that copper houses all of these electrical atoms that can transmit that type of energy to the people engaging with it becomes performance in itself.”

— Solange Knowles

A laptop displays the High Line website, featuring an aerial view of the park with people walking and a yellow taxi below

Using Chrome for Research

Using Chrome for Research

“When I'm using Chrome, there are at least 50 tabs open. Research is so vital to me, so I don't want to close anything because I don't want to chance risking where my information lives.”

— Solange Knowles

Tab groups in Chrome can help organize your browsing.

A person with dark, curly hair sits at a desk, typing on a laptop displaying images of Solange Knowles' architectural sculpture

Split View in Chrome

Split View in Chrome

“I have spent a lot of time putting windows side by side and switching between them as I ideate and gather information and images for research. I have a very visual mind's eye and so I love being able to now have the functionality to do this through the split view feature. Juxtaposition is such a powerful tool in imagining how nuanced ideas sit side by side and I love being able to do this in real time.”

— Solange Knowles

The cover of "Black Artists on Art, Volume 1" by Lewis and Waddy, featuring a man standing in tall grass

Black Artists on Art Volume 1 from the Saint Heron library

Black Artists on Art Volume 1 from the Saint Heron library

“I often use the St. Heron Library as a resource for my sculptural practice. It features a lot of artists who have a lot of really innovative interpretations of material usage, and there's actually a lot of women artists in this specific book who have not received the notoriety they deserve. I specifically love this volume because it covers a lot of artists who work across various mediums and between sculpture and performance and music and dance. It just really inspires me to know that people have been working across different processes as a means of expression for as long as we can remember. I think that people present that as if that's sort of a new frontier, but it's helpful to remember that that has been a way that black artists have been expressing themselves since the beginning of time.”

— Solange Knowles

Solange Knowles's unfinished sculpture features a rust-colored oval and dark metal geometric shapes on a white background

Art Deco Copper & Brass Lamp

Art Deco Copper & Brass Lamp

“I collected this lamp about 5 years ago and it’s lived in my home as a mysterious object that really channels the spirit of all of the things I am transitioning to evolve from in my earlier sculptural work. The patina of the copper, the rust, the fingerprints, the danger and sharpness of the edges, the way it feels like it evokes the spirit of an ancestral form, and sits tall and mighty all subconsciously inspired the spirit I wish to evoke with this new work.”

— Solange Knowles

A BOMB magazine article about Fred Eversley's Black, White, Grey: Cosmic Objects, featuring a white, translucent, ring-shaped sculpture

Fred Eversley

Fred Eversley

"Fred Eversley’s work was monumental in my understanding and discovery of sculpture as science. He is my northern star in resin works and defining the both mathematical and spiritual lineage within the forms and what I wish to radiate with my work.”

— Solange Knowles

Ancient Egyptian fresco depicting three men using foot bellows for copper smelting

Egyptian Copper Smelting Process

Egyptian Copper Smelting Process

“I find myself pretty deep in the interwebs which opens new portals that I wasn't even expecting, which is what I love about Chrome because it keeps the speed I need to operate on. Egypt is such a core foundation in my origin story. Very few civilizations understand material, architecture, and symmetry as rooted in spirit, the way Egyptians have throughout history. Knowing and understanding how they have historically used copper was affirming for the process.”

— Solange Knowles

A book cover for "Julian Abele: Architect and the Beaux Arts" by Dreck Spurlock Wilson, featuring a geometric architectural line drawing on a light gray background

Architect and the Beaux Arts (Minorities in Architecture)

Architect and the Beaux Arts (Minorities in Architecture)

“I often look to architecture as a guide within my sculptural practice because I largely see art and architecture through the same lens, and there's a lot of architectural considerations within how I fabricate my scenic and sculptural designs. There's a lot of structural and weight considerations. This book is so important to me because over the last ten years, I've really devoted a lot of time into researching the first Black architects in America as I sort of continue to expand within my own architectural considerations and practices.”

— Solange Knowles

Public Sculpture

Solange Knowles, with long dark hair, intently works on her "Unfinished Sculpture" project at a laptop
Solange Knowles, with long dark hair, sits at a desk, looking at her laptop in a bright, minimalist studio

Finish what you started with Chrome

Scroll to return to all projects

PinkPantheress
Three custom PinkPantheress ballet flats are arranged diagonally, featuring polka dot, lace, and clear patent leather designs
PinkPantheress sits on a patterned rug, surrounded by various ballet flats, looking up at the camera
Solange Knowles
Solange Knowles's unfinished glass and architectural sculpture features a yellow orb on a clear prism, next to a tall glass
Solange Knowles, with long dark hair, poses in a black mesh top and dark skirt against a white background
Joe Burrow
Joe Burrow's custom mineral and crystal chess set features a black and white board with various gemstone pieces
Joe Burrow, a young man with light brown hair, stands against a gray wall wearing a navy polo shirt