From the Magazine
September 2018 Issue

Tina Knowles Lawson on Her Black Art Collection, Beyoncé, Solange, and Creativity

In conversation with curator Kimberly Drew, Beyoncé and Solange’s mother discusses her collecting journey, from a $500 painting to high-end auctions.
Tina Knowles Lawson in her living room with Kimberly Drew.
Tina Knowles Lawson in her living room with Kimberly Drew, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s social-media manager, who is known online as @museummammy.Photograph by Gillian Laub.

Tina Knowles Lawson is walking me through her art collection on a bright Friday afternoon. A smooth figure, carved from wood by the sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, is situated near her Hollywood home’s front door in a museum-quality case. To the left, a set of glinting Fabergé eggs are on display in a glass bureau, which also houses a handwritten letter from Michelle Obama, thanking Lawson for her support on Barack’s 2008 campaign. Two paintings, one by Hale Woodruff, the other Charles Alston, are mounted in the staircase and just above the grand piano. From every vantage point, the home is saturated with stunning mementos of black life. While some art collections feel like a mausoleum, Lawson’s comes alive as she stops before various pieces, sharing anecdotes and art-history lessons.

Earlier that morning, when I typed what I’d been told was Lawson’s address into my smartphone, I had visions of being blindfolded upon arrival and taken to a remote location, wherein the interview might actually commence. But I did indeed arrive at her house, which she shares with her husband, Richard Lawson. The property is equal parts Old Hollywood glamour (the architect completed work in 1924) and Rodeo Drive chic (Lawson designed the infinity pool installed along the front path); I found Lawson in the kitchen applying mascara, with an assistant, a stylist, and a makeup artist standing by. The night before, she told me, she had dropped by her elder daughter’s house to collect a few outfits for the day’s shoot, calling to mind the shoes and accessories my own mother has expropriated from my wardrobe over the years. It turns out that even (and perhaps especially) if you’re the biggest pop star in the world, when your mother needs an outfit, she needs an outfit.

Because this is, after all, the mother of Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles Carter and Solange Knowles Ferguson—two women whose prodigious, individual musical talents have vaulted them into a new realm of celebrity, whose privacy is guarded above all else, and who mutually agree that much of their success is owed to their mother’s powerful influence and care. “I think it’s something to say that my introduction to art was black art,” Solange said in a January interview with Surface magazine, referring to her mother’s collection, then housed in their Houston childhood home. “When my kids were growing up, it was really important to me that they saw images of African-Americans,” Lawson tells me. “I’m so happy that I did, because both of them are really aware of their culture, and I think a lot of that had to do with looking at those images every day, those strong images.”

Left, Elegant Garveyite, by Houston artist Robert Pruitt, who is known for his versatility in both style and medium; right, Me Too, by Genevieve Gaignard, a Los Angeles–based artist whose work explores the intersections of race, class, and femininity.

Photographs by Gillian Laub; Artworks, left, © Robert A. Pruitt, courtesy of The Artist and Koplin Del Rio Gallery; right, © Genevieve Gaignard, courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles.

And while music might first come to mind when thinking about Beyoncé and Solange, visual art has taken an increasingly prominent place in the lives of both women. This spring, Solange, who has previously presented work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum and London’s Tate Modern, debuted Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube), an interdisciplinary performance project about the creative process, at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum. Just days before my interview with her mother, Beyoncé and her husband, Jay-Z, dropped the instantly viral first video for their surprise joint album, Everything Is Love, which accompanies the bombastic, champagne trap song “Apeshit” and which was shot exclusively in and around Paris’s iconic Louvre museum.

Born in Galveston, Texas, in 1954, Lawson—along with six siblings, two of whom have since passed away—was raised by her mother, a seamstress, and father, a longshoreman. “I grew up really poor, and I had a lot of shame about it,” Lawson says. It was only later in life that she found out her mother had bartered sewing work to send her children to a costly Catholic school.

Lawson long believed she’d never leave Galveston, but when she was 14, a female friend took her to Houston to see the Alvin Ailey dance company. “I saw those dancers and all those well-dressed black folks,” she says. “It made me want to get out of my little town and have a bigger world.” Half a decade later, during a year-long stint in Los Angeles pursuing a career as a makeup artist, she made her first big art purchase—a $500 abstract painting from a furniture store. “It was probably a reproduction, but it was so beautiful and it was in a frame. I discovered then how important [art] is for your home. It made me feel good every day.”

Following her divorce in 2011, Knowles says, “one of the things that made me the most happy was reading art books,” like these on Radcliffe Bailey, Kermit Oliver, and Diego Rivera. “I have a storage facility with, probably, every African-American artist’s history.”

Photograph by Gillian Laub; Artwork, © Kermit Oliver, courtesy of Hooks-Epstein Galleries.

Today, her collection has swelled to include works by artists ranging from Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, and Henry Ossawa Tanner—the turn-of-the-century African-American ex-pat who garnered huge success after moving to Paris—to more contemporary works by Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kenyatta A. C. Hinkle, and Lawson’s own niece Dominique Beyoncé. “I love collecting and knowing the history of the artist,” says Lawson, who has always seen her relationship to art as more spiritual than material. In front of a painting by Kermit Oliver, she delivers an impromptu trivia session on the Texan mixed-media artist: he’s the only American in history who designed scarves for Hermès, yet he nevertheless chose to work as a mail sorter at a Waco post office. “It kept him normal,” she says.

Over the course of our tour, Lawson continually expresses that art has been a major tool in helping her find joy and retain a sense of self despite dedicating so much of her life to her children. In the wake of her 2011 divorce from her first husband, Mathew Knowles, Lawson threw herself into work, running her popular Houston salon and doing wardrobe for her elder daughter. “I was really depleted,” she says. “I remember Beyoncé saying to me, ‘Mama, what will make you laugh? What makes you happy?’ ” She started reading art books and going out dancing. She called an old friend, the artist Monica Stewart, and rekindled their relationship: today, three of Stewart’s paintings are on view in Lawson’s house. One, an abstract titled Adoration, was commissioned by Lawson. “It’s supposed to be my two girls looking up at me.”

Forging such relationships with artists accounts for part of her collection, but she also acquires pieces at auction—though she’s the first to admit that the auction house can be a dangerous place for her. The first time she tried bidding over the phone, Lawson says, she planned to purchase something inexpensive, just to get a feel for the process. “I got on,” she says, “and next thing I know I bought a Sam Gilliam, I bought two Picasso lithographs. I was like, ‘What did I do?’ I tried not to buy them, but they found me and they threatened to sue me.” I think of the Instagram video Lawson posted earlier this year: at the WACO Theater Center’s annual Wearable Art Gala, her six-year-old granddaughter, Blue Ivy, is perched between her parents, gleefully locked in a bidding war against Tyler Perry for a painting of Sidney Poitier.

An untitled work by Kermit Oliver, who, Lawson says, “couldn’t care less about the fame or the fortune.”

Photograph by Gillian Laub.

The WACO Theater Center, co-founded by Lawson and her husband in 2017, is a large-scale mentoring program that immerses children, the group’s “angels and warriors,” in art programming as they journey from adolescence into adulthood. The first trip Lawson took with the “angels,” she says, was to see a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

As our tour comes to a close, I take one last look around. In an enclave separating the sunroom from the kitchen, there is a panel by the emerging artist Genevieve Gaignard situated under a lithograph by the storied muralist John Biggers, one of Lawson’s favorite artists. Biggers’s print is one of five that were made to accompany “Our Grandmothers,” by Maya Angelou—two more spill into the adjoining room. The poem, which Angelou wrote for the 1993 presidential inauguration, celebrates the endurance of the black matriarch despite the ills of slavery and systematic oppression. “When you learn, teach,” the poem reads. “When you get, give.”