On Tuesday evening, a line of very fashionable guests grew outside Surrogate’s Courthouse in Lower Manhattan, snaking down the block and around the corner.
They weren’t there to manage estate affairs or family wills. Rather, they had arrived to borrow a book from Solange Knowles.
Ms. Knowles, 39, is many things: a singer, a songwriter, an activist, an actress, a choreographer, a composer, a sculptor, a visual artist.
She’s also very bookish.
For the past four years, Ms. Knowles has been quietly lending physical books across the country through her Saint Heron Library, originally a collection of 50 rare or out-of-print books by Black and brown writers including Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange and Langston Hughes. In September, she teased a significant expansion of the library, with the help of her team and book curators, to around 2,150 copies now in circulation.
An avid researcher, Ms. Knowles has spent considerable time over the past few years studying Amaza Lee Meredith, one of the country’s first Black female and queer architects. Through her multidisciplinary institution, Saint Heron, Ms. Knowles debuted a research journal on Tuesday called “Azurest Blue” that chronicles Meredith’s life and work. The 69-page booklet, available with four different covers, is why hundreds had gathered outside a Manhattan courthouse on a November night, hoping to pick up one of the copies available for loan.
“I find that when we have the events where we’re actually able to connect with people and have that exchange of curiosity and like-mindedness for these stories, it creates expansion within us,” she said in a phone interview.
Ms. Knowles’s growing ambitions for the Saint Heron Library coincide with her return to school: In October, she was named the first scholar in residence at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music.
Ms. Knowles described her fear that older, largely out-of-print books by Black writers would be inaccessible to communities that would greatly benefit from them. In this modest way, she could give back.
“I believe that a lot of the expressions of these books can change lives if they are reaching people who seek and have a thirst and a yearning for knowledge and expression and imagination,” she said.
The project speaks to the evolution of a polymathic artist who is carving out her place in the world of academia.
Put another way: She’s in her librarian era.
Road Trips and Due Dates
Since beginning her career at 15, Ms. Knowles has dropped five solo releases, one of which, “A Seat at the Table,” earned her a Grammy in 2017. Her performance art and sculptural work has been featured in the Guggenheim in New York and the Tate Modern in London. She composed an original score for the New York City Ballet. She designed her own line of glassware and published several books through Saint Heron Press.
Not long after releasing her last album, “When I Get Home,” in 2019, Ms. Knowles began diving deeper into archival work and preservation, researching the practices of Black figures whose work she felt was underrecognized. In 2020, she had the idea to research the pioneering work of Meredith, the architect, who died in 1984. Among her accomplishments were designing homes for Black families in Sag Harbor and establishing the fine arts department at Virginia State University, a historically Black college.
“I do feel an urgency to make sure that this story is not for the ‘heads,’” she said, using a term for the most deeply committed disciples of a given subject.
The idea for the library came about on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York in October 2020, during which Ms. Knowles would stop at vintage and secondhand bookstores across the country and collect dusty volumes. (At the time, opting to travel on the road trip felt like a necessity: Being immunocompromised, she was cautious about traveling by plane as the coronavirus spread around the world.)
No one would argue that a mail-order lending library is the most efficient way to spread ideas in 2025. The option to lend out e-books or digitize their pages and send out links on the internet were right there, and perhaps not as logistically demanding.
But Ms. Knowles’s deep affection for physical media is the main reason she’s taking a more sentimental approach to disseminating these stories. She wants her borrowers to immerse themselves in the material offline, she said, and trusts that they will maintain the books’ condition for the next person.
“One of the things that was super important to me is creating more of a tactile experience where there’s really energy exchanged through these objects,” she said. “And just knowing that these books are continuing to go from hand to hand and living in people’s homes among their other cherished objects.”
As her collection grew, she discovered how “pivotal” this time was for her and helped her expanded Saint Heron to focus more on research and archival work. The books became resources for her own ideas, like catalogs by Houston Conwill or Fred Eversley, two Black American sculptors whose writings she would often revisit while she experimented with resin sculptural objects, or writings on astrology and numerology by the journalist Justine Rector.
Two years later, she hit the road again, this time traveling from New York to Los Angeles, and collected more books along the way with the intention to share them.
“I was astonished that in a year and a half, the value of the books specifically with Black artists, Black literary writers, Black poets had, in a lot of cases, doubled in value,” she said. “I became really concerned that the market was evolving and changing pretty drastically, and that it was really important for me, for Black people, Black thinkers, Black artists, Black creators, to be able to assign our own value systems to these books.”
Since October 2021, the library has lent books, catalogs and journals to readers living in the United States. It’s free to use and operates on an “honor-based borrowing system,” administered by the small Saint Heron team, who send books directly to borrowers from the Saint Heron studio in Manhattan with complimentary shipping and return postage. All books must be returned within 45 days of checkout, and lost and damaged books are subject to a fine.
She said she was proud to report that the Saint Heron Library had “a 99 percent return rate,” even if some borrowers miss their due dates.
“We do take folks’ names and numbers and social media handles, and so occasionally we might DM someone, just to give a gentle nudge to return,” she said. “But I also feel like if someone is keeping this object and this source of knowledge that is really near and dear to them, that’s not a loss for me.”
Back to School
Growing up, Ms. Knowles said her parents always told her she would “probably become a teacher.” Yet her educational journey, after becoming pregnant with her son at 17, led to her earning a high school equivalency diploma. Although she didn’t go to college, her yearning to further her education grew into a career that stretched beyond her musical pursuits.
Her parents’ guess at her future turned out to be prescient.
As part of her three-year residency at U.S.C.’s Thornton School of Music, Ms. Knowles will finally walk through collegiate halls, though as an instructor, developing her own curriculum and programs that focus on music curation for film, events and experimental design.
“I think the thing that I’m most excited about is really nurturing students’ inner personal narratives of storytelling and helping them amplify that and create vernacular and visual language behind these ideas,” she said.
At Tuesday’s pickup event in Manhattan, several rare books from the Saint Heron Library were situated on a white, cruciform structure in the court’s main lobby. Directly beneath the building’s marble double staircase were stacks of the Meredith zine for attendees to borrow.
On the intermediate landing of the staircase was Precious Renee Tucker, an experimental organist and keyboardist, who performed five-minute sets starting every 1,939 seconds (about 32 minutes). The length of the intervals alluded to the year Meredith’s residence on the Virginia State campus, called Azurest South, was completed. Ms. Knowles watched the gathering from the second floor.
Similar pickup events will be held in different cities across the country, including Detroit, Los Angeles and at Virginia State University, through December, where 1,939 free copies of the book will be available to borrow for a 55-day period. Once all of the copies have been returned, they will be available to purchase at a later date.
To tell Meredith’s story, the book features archival materials, photos and commissioned essays from Black thinkers and scholars. In the back of each journal is a personalized checkout slip, which Ms. Knowles called a nod to “many of our inner child’s library experience.”
Even while playing “a very, very small role,” it’s been gratifying to watch the evolution of the project, she said. “It’s been such a labor of love.”
Gina Cherelus covers dating, relationships and culture for The Times and writes the weekly dating column Third Wheel.
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