SAINT HERON’S NEW DESIGN FRONTIER

Founded in 2013, Saint Heron, the rhizomatic creative agency of cultural multi-hyphenate Solange Knowles, is commanding new grounds: after publishing music compilations and performances, establishing a book archive of cultural and social luminaries, the collective is now taking on furniture for size. Collaborating with Jason McDonald, a glass artist based in Philadelphia and Mark Grattan, Head of Product Development at Saint Heron, Knowles and the team have devised a limited-edition assortment of glass decorative works under the agency’s concept shop, Small Matter, which will be available starting June 12, 2023.

The functional sculptures — one-of-a-kind and hand-blown by McDonald in his studio, evinced by their bespoke idiosyncrasies — further articulate Saint Heron’s creative lingua franca of intentionality, community, and artistic precision. For Saint Heron, this collection has come to represent a monumentalizing distillation of time, thought, and material, as well as magnifying the cultural significance of what Knowles describes as an “object designed with Black thought and created by Black hands.”  The intention is to create art objects and elevated homewares that are equally accessible as they are embodiments of quality artistry. Works that are, in turn, generative toward contemporary design and architectural forms and silhouettes. The Small Matter Art Objects project will be concurrently followed by the Small Matter Form Glass Collection, a series that “democratizes the act of collecting and exhibiting” in the domestic space, and will consist of a survey of commissioned glassworks by emerging Black artists across the country. Saint Heron’s dual-range collection of domestic art objects will be sold exclusively at saintheron.com.