Solange’s New ‘Performance Art Film’ Stars Rothko Chapel and Celestial Cowboys

Solange has released a 33-minute film to accompany her new album When I Get Home (2019). The music video opens and closes within Houston’s Rothko Chapel, and other segments include animations by the artists Robert Pruitt and Jacolby Satterwhite – the latter was also a contributing director on the project.

The visual companion to Solange’s album is predominantly composed of footage shot in Texas, and features choreographed dance scenes, a fleet of DeLoreans, and a spaceship console, before segueing into a sequence of animations – ‘an exploration of origin, asking the question how much of ourselves do we bring with us versus leave behind in our evolution,’ Solange’s representatives said. It is available to stream on Apple Music.

Within the ‘interdisciplinary performance art film’, Satterwhite’s celestial animation appears set to the song ‘Sound of Rain’, featuring a naked cowboy astride a glittering horse-like creature. Satterwhite described his section as living ‘under the guise of Afrofuturism […] like entering a futuristic unreal space as a form of escapism’.

‘We were talking about finding a sense of home again, home for her was Houston, Texas's Third Ward, a lot of her mood boards for the project were centered around sacred geometry, black rodeo, and family,’ Satterwhite said. ‘I tattooed all those motifs into my own rhythm when I started animating all fall and winter.’

In an interview with The New York Times, Solange described how the Menil Collection ‘was one of the first art spaces I had access to. I would go into the Rothko Chapel and sit in there for hours.’ Founded in 1971 by the art patrons John and Dominique de Menil, the Rothko Chapel opened its doors a year after the artist committed suicide. The chapel, which aims to offer a ’sacred space open to all people’, houses 14 of Rothko’s monumental black and purple murals.