Save Me A Seat at the Table for When I Get Home

An Exhibit on Centering — MA Capstone, Spring 2026

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“The centering experience is an experience in the soul, whether we get it primarily through hands or eyes or imagination, and this is its compelling strategy. When we are on center, we experience reality in depth rather than in partition.” - Richards

DIRECTORY + INFORMATION

↓ VIDEO IN FULL ↓

this blog is a written portion of an exhibit on centering completed for the requirements of a master's degree in english, spring 2026.

↓ below you will find the blog's directory ↓

Something About Solange

Building Bridges

Even if We’re Miles Apart (And Miles and Miles Apart)

So Many

When I Move, You Move

Round and Round

No Limit Soldiers

Being Black On Purpose

For Us By Us

An Ode To...

Works Cited

Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

When I Get Home - Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube

A Seat at the Table - Spotify | Apple Music | YouTube

Definitions (by me)

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SOLANGE − CRANES IN THE SKY directed by Solange Knowles & Alan Ferguson

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“Alright Sydney, when this beat drops I wanna see everybody fucking DANCE!”

S O L A N G E  performs Losing You at the Sydney Opera House, 2018

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MONCLER MONDOGENIUS Presents Solange Knowles

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An Ode To...

I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materializes and de-materializes grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter-of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them. This seems to me to be a dialogue of the visible and the invisible to which our ears are attuned - Richards

The Poetry Foundation describes an ode as a formal written work meant to celebrate a person, place, or thing in varying forms. In this way, we can think of the work Solange produces as an ode to Black people, and more specifically, Black women. Similarly, Richards’ work is an ode to craft and the human mind. Solange’s ode is shaped by her attention to Black aesthetics of Afrofuturism and the like, while Richards’ is shaped through ceramics. 

In segments 5 and 10 of the video, Solange’s futuristic vision takes flight (no pun intended). It is where she literally places the reader in a sci-fi/fantasy world as we travel through space and time to the tracks “Exit Scott (interlude)” and “S McGregor (interlude)” from When I Get Home. The idea with these segments, like much of the video, is to showcase memory (the past) as an important piece of imagining a new future (and even a new present).

Here, Solange is using centering to build worlds as an ode to Black women. She highlights their resistance and resilience in the face of a world that leaves them with hearts that “know no delight,” and allows them to create their own. In this way, Solange prioritizes and celebrates the Black community as the creators and tastemakers of culture, encouraging the viewer to realize that “the glory is in you,” as Master P says in “Interlude: The Glory is in You.”

To come to the center, we all must have the audacity to dream. To create. To imagine a world that is different from the one we live in now. To use all of our experience to engage in the process of creation so that we can all understand and be understood. To live lives fully and on our own terms.

By creating work that allows an audience to come to center, Solange is telling us all to be No Limit Soldiers. 

I know I have said it many times in this project (though in different ways, I hope), but it cannot be overstated that centering is a never-ending journey. So much so that even though I have completed this exhibit, there is no end to the work I have done here. As I continue to live, re-read Richards, sit in my room alone listening to Solange, and whatever else it is I do in this life, this work can be remixed and expanded upon in ways that could look totally different in a year from now, or even in the next day or so after I have submitted my work for review. The point is, we are all evolving all the time, and to understand how we do so, we need art, whether we are creating or consuming it. So, here’s to centering, to art, and new ways of being in the world. Cheers!  

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For Us By Us

The film is really about standing still in that unknown, and feeling solitude and sanity in the silence of it all. The reckoning of what I may hear and see if I did in fact silence all those parts of myself and if I could really live with, and swallow, the truths that come up. For me personally, it speaks a lot about reimagining the infinite possibilities of darkness, and changing the way we experience that vastness of space. I got to sit with Scarface while I was making this album and he said some really powerful shit to me about his constant need and attraction to darkness, and I realized in that moment how much we have been taught to only rely on light as a guiding force for healing and rebirth. I wasn’t leaning into the possibilities of darkness out of fear, but even from a filming perspective leaning into the vastness that blackness creates was so expansive for my process. - Solange

Artists like Master P, Solange, and OutKast see Black people, hear them, and instead of making them shrink so that they can sit at a crowded table that doesn’t want them as guests to begin with, they have made their own tables by hand and pull up chairs to that one instead. 

We had to find that rhythm, that glory, given the circumstances and the cards that we were dealt. We have to be allowed to celebrate that. It just turned into a much bigger idea – outside of them I wanted to speak to other black men and women who really saw the sense of seeking independence and empowerment, like Master P. - Solange

When we speak of making our own tables and things like that, we find ourselves looking at how the artists mentioned work intentionally. It’s all about the aesthetics, but what are they? Well, for the likes of Solange and OutKast, it’s Afrofuturism, which I have already mentioned briefly, but it’s also about the Afro-surrealist aesthetic. 

We, as Black people, have historically not been presented as regal beings in society. I feel like if there is anyone who has expressed that from day one, it’s been Master P. He’s always been so, so incredibly regal, even in the way he expressed through his wealth — all of the gold, but also the wealth of independence. - Solange

These aesthetics are (without explicitly saying so) tied to/inspired by a centering practice. They promote an active and conscious reshaping of the present by placing Black people at the center of a work. And Solange uses them to her advantage, guiding her audience through her creative process. When I think about how these aesthetics, Richards, and Solange all come together, I am reminded of this bundle of quotes from Richards: 

1. “We come to know ourselves, and others, through the images we create…these images are disclosures of ourselves to ourselves. They are life-revelations”  2. “When one stands like a natural substance, plastic but with one's own character written into the formula, ah then one feels oneself part of the world, taking one's shape with its help but a shape only one's own freedom can create.” 3. “You can do very many things with [humans]: push us together and pull us apart and squeeze us and roll us flat, empty us out and fill us up. You can surround us with influences, but there comes a point when you can do no more. The person resists, in one way or another (if it is only by collapsing, like the clay). His own will becomes active”

Black aesthetics allow us to resist and take hold of our own (active) will. It is for this reason that we can make a full circle (see what I did there?) back to the final time we see Solange dancing with the holy ghost figure. 

She is actively using black aesthetics and historical connection to drive home Master P’s words as he says: “we came here as slaves but we goin’ out as royalty” in some ways this “royalty” can be interpreted as a richness in sprit, a centeredness if you will, that comes from acknowledging ones current position and ones past in order to step into a future that is of your own making. This point is also reinforced in the final segment as Master P says, “I don’t have no limit to what I can do,” and Solange is seen dancing in white with a crowd of people.  

“His name is literally Master P.” is another point my friend had made during our conversation. There is something there about Blackness and actively awakening one’s own will through resistance to the system. It takes, in my opinion, a certain ear (for hip-hop/rap, for Blackness, etc) to appreciate and understand Master P and his music. This is a point he recognizes himself as he says on “Interlude: For Us By Us”

“I tell people all the time, ‘if you don’t understand my record, you don’t understand me, so this is not for you.’”  

which is boldly Afrofurutisic and surreal because how else could a Black man from Louisiana really sit up here and call himself a master? He is taking the language of slavery and struggle for his people and using it to rewrite the present and the future—his nod to the past presents him as a master of himself and shows how Black aesthetics can be used not to forget or gloss over the past, but to reclaim it and use it to reimagine the present and future. By taking control of the narrative through naming, he is reborn, within a centering practice that allows him to merge timelines as Solange does and reimagine his own present and future. 

What we are witnessing here is the innerness and outerness of centering, where we come to a point at which we recognize that we cannot forget the past or shun it; we must acknowledge and learn from it if we are to even begin conceiving new ways of being in the world. In my current understanding, this is the importance of Afrofuturism and surrealism; they (like centering when adopted as a philosophy) are tools that will lead us to a better future.

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"The film is really meant to be a reflection, a sort of abstract transportive experience that could even act as a sort of a tantra or reset, and so I think experiencing it alone can tap into another necessary space of intention." - Solange for WePresent

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"The hardest and most rewarding lesson has been to learn to experience antipathy objectively, with warmth. For antipathy follows a gesture of separating, and the goal, which is to be both separate and connected, requires that one move inwardly in opposite directions. Toward self-definition and toward community. Toward ethical individualism and toward social justice. It is this fusing of the opposites that Centering enables." - Richards in Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person

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"World-making and trying to create new landscapes and meccas is so much about the future for me, because I know so much about the people who left the blueprint for me to exist right now [...] I want to make astounding work, but I really want to make work to be discovered 50 years from now. So building that arena [in the film] was really about leaving an imprint, leaving my stamp on this world in 50 years, of how I envision this rodeo, of how I envision this space where Black bodies can unite and make sculpture out of their bodies and out of their shapes and out of their souls. It’s one thing to imagine it and one thing to manifest it, and I think so much of the album is just about that." - Solange for NME Magazine

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Being Black on Purpose

“Art is an intuitive act of the spirit in its evolution toward divine nature.” Because it is an act of self-education in this sense, it cannot be evaluated apart from its maker, the one whose vision it represents. That is why judging is such a ticklish business. To judge prematurely is often to cripple. To refrain from judging is sometimes to impoverish. - Richards 

In a conversation with a close friend about my capstone and the way I see Solange, said friend mentioned, “Solange [and Master P] are Black on purpose. [They] aren’t trying to create art for anyone other than Black people,” not soley for the dollar, not for the accolades, or to pull up a chair to a table already set by people who want to capitalize off of them. Master P says as much in “Interlude: For Us By Us.” 

And they offered me a million-dollar deal, and had the check ready. Said I wouldn’t be able to use my name. I was fighting my brother, because “Man, you shoulda took the million dollars!” I said, “No, what you think I’m worth? If this white man offer me a million dollars, I gotta be worth forty, or fifty... Or ten or something.” To being able to make “Forbes” and come from the Projects. You know, “Top 40 Under 40.” Which they said couldn’t be done.”

He centered himself and took a chance, in turn building an empire that allowed Black people to make their own way through No Limit Records. This was huge for rappers in the South who were often counted out by rappers (and audiences) on the North and East coasts until OutKast won ‘Best New Rap Group’ in 1995 at the Source Awards, and André 3000 made the statement “The South got somethin’ to say.” 

I think that it was really healing for me to hear Master P tell those stories. He’s affirming that we can build and create opportunities for ourselves: we don’t have to ask for permission. - Solange

The healing Solange describes in talking about Master P’s storytelling is centering. It is an example of what centering can do when we move beyond the potter’s wheel (and sometimes even beyond the written word, or music, etc). It is about community and how being in community with others, especially elders, can be wholly beneficial to artists and non-artists alike. 

We must be brave and come to use the past and the present to rewrite (or reimagine) our collective futures. André 3000’s bravery to get on stage and say the south had something to say has written a future for southern hip hop that people once thought unimaginable, just as No Limit Records did. The result is a rap industry dominated by Southern rap—everyone is listening to what the South has to say.

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No Limit Soldiers

People wanna know what "No Limit" comes from. My grandfather, Big Daddy, was in the military. And, uh, you know, he always said, "Man, them people ain't gon' do nothing for us." So he was like,"Grandson, you need to start your own army." And that's where the tanks and the military thing come from...My grandfather, he said, 'Why you gon' call it "No Limit"?" I said, "Because I don't have no limit to what I could do." - Master P

There’s no way I could spend all this time talking about this exhibit without mentioning the one and only Master P in his own section. I mean, he’s literally 90% of the interludes across the final project and A Seat at the Table. Without him, there really is no project, because Solange has arranged her tracks across both albums so that the interludes become integral to the full listening experience. 

For those that don’t know Master P, aka Percy Robert Miller (Cymphonique and Romeo Miller’s dad—iykyk), is a NOLA rapper who rose to fame in the 90s and is the founder of No Limit Records, a record label built from the ground up.

He started No Limit from absolutely nothing, and every record label in the industry came to him with multi-million-dollar deals, and he constantly spoke about self-empowerment, and not giving yourself to the highest bidder, and having the foresight and the rebellion to own that and to stand firm. Especially at that time, for a black man, it was just really, really mind-blowing to me […] He’s a hero. - Solange

His importance to Solange and A Seat at the Table comes from his position as one of (if not the) first person Solange saw put themselves and their Blackness at the fore. She says, 

Once I had these ideas of someone who really, really exhibited black empowerment and independence. I couldn’t think of anyone who was more fitting than Master P. He’s someone I’ve always had a great deal of admiration for. I asked him to come in and speak for this one song, and he ended up being the most incredible storyteller. - Solange

As her hero, his contributions to the project can’t be overstated. He brings a particular energy to the album that makes his words really stick. When placed beside Richards, we realize that he is absolutely right: there is no limit to what we can do when we lean into the creative process. 

In being creative, we also force ourselves to be brave, to be bold. In Master P’s context, centering takes on multiple meanings at once, putting poetry into practice and allowing storytelling to give the project real weight. Richards says that 

poetry is truth [...] But it doesn’t invent the truth. It too must listen, to the poetry that flows inaudibly beneath all speech. So it is difficult to use words and yet to invoke the sense of life which is unspoken, unspeakable, what is left after the books are all decayed, lost, burned, forgotten. What remains after the pot has disappeared. - Richards 

Master P found the poetry in his history and, through his craft (hip hop), molded it into a centering narrative. He grounded himself through his ability to create and sing his “battle cry,” to rewrite his present and future (taking a different path than his parents/grandparents, and even other artists in the industry who would’ve taken the million dollars he was offered).  

His boldness in doing so clearly helped to center Solange and, in turn, has centered this project. We can see as much throughout, especially in segments 4 and 11. 

To say that you and what you create are limitless is to show that resistance must be an intentional and active process that starts with a single individual and, through their work, becomes an example for others to follow. This is centering.

To be a No Limit Soldier is to operate in authenticity and independence, to lean into community and let your art speak for itself.

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Yuko Nasak, 'Untitled,' 1964,

Synthetic paint, plaster and glue on cotton, mounted on wooden board,

Dimensions: 1817 x 919 mm.

Courtesy: Tate

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““It is in our bodies that redemption takes place. It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me: I learn through my hands and my eyes and skin what I could never learn through my brain.”

— M. C. Richards

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M.C. Richards in the studio, ca. 1973

This is from the book The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings one of the few books on ceramics I think everyone needs to read.

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Round n Round

Lets talk about the circle in the room, shall we?

Even if I’m not sure it’s intentional, they’re literally everywhere. In Richards’ text, in Solange’s visuals, in the words Master P says on the interludes of A Seat at the Table. We can’t escape them—I can’t escape them. Pick just about any point in the video exhibit, and you’ll find a circle (for this section, I have included video segments 2 and 3 for examples of circular visuals and language). 

Circles are connected to many things in ways that we can see and in ways that we can’t. For example, we can see the passing of time and even measure it by changes in our bodies, but we don’t see that the cycle loops: we are born, we live, we die. However, when we take on centering practices, we add to the cycle and are reborn. As many have said, what matters is how we live in the middle, and what better way to live meaningfully than to come to center through art (this is where we are reborn)? 

What’s so interesting about the motif for me is just how often I was drawn to circles as I went about pulling clips. It had gone completely over my head until I showed my first draft to my mom, who was like “The way you’re using circles is so clever!😁” and I was like “lol, girl what?😗” and then I went back to the project file and was floored at how my subconscious was picking up on all these circles, spheres, and rounded metaphors.

My engagement with them is immediate, and segment two starts with Master P’s voice on “Interlude: Pedestals,” and we are hit with the image of a circle within a circle, and people dressed in black coming to the middle. In the third sequence, the camera has flowing, rounded movements, and people are walking in circles…I mean, literally, out of the video’s 11 segments, only three do not feature circles visually, but even still, they are embedded in the language. 

Going back to Richards’ text, circles are integral to centering. She says this outright: 

As we grow to life size, our perceptions widen and deepen and grow finer in detail. A curious thing happens: and again I grasp it through a potter’s image. As we come to contain reality as our inner shape, we “fall into round.” We take the shape in which we are originally “thrown.” Awareness and behavior fuse; inner and outer dissolve to transparency. - Richards 

Ah, the circle of the potters’ wheel (even though I have never worked with pottery myself, I feel like Richards has written about it in a way that makes me feel like I have). You start by slapping a misshapen circle of clay onto the wheel, then mold it carefully into a cone, and from there you shape it any way you want as long as it’s centered on the wheel. It’s just like with music and poetry, you can sing the words anyway you’d like as long as you’ve got some of the basic technical skills down.

When looking at pottery as a metaphor, Solange further emphasizes its connections to music by discussing repetition and returning home (the act of returning to something can also be looked at as a circular process).

I think repetition at this place in my life has given me a lot of reinforcement—a lot of reinforcement to my spirit, my mind, and my body, and trying to align all of those things and really ground myself in them so that I really believe them [...]and I think so much of this album and this project, and this film is really about my body and the things that I had to do to reinforce these beliefs into my body. It’s one thing to think with your spirit; it’s another thing to actually live it through your body. - Solange

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When I Move, You Move 

"Art is always bodily. There lies its affront to a cartesian educational ideology and to a patriarchal satisfaction with cognitive knowledge alone, with truth in the head that never penetrates heart or body and therefore fails to heal the body politic. Centering is a bodily book, an incarnational work. Born of M.C.’s bodily work on the potter’s wheel with the earthy substance that clay and body are. This book renders impossible the unconsciousness of the body. It begs for the reunion of body, mind, and spirit.”

In her text, Richards has a way of coming back to the physical body. In the body is where it all takes place. By ‘it all,’ I mean centering, life, time…it’s all connected, and Solange is constantly on the move. 

Richards text opens with the following quote: 

For CENTERING is my theme: how we may seek to bring universe into a personal wholeness, and into act the rich life which moves so mysteriously and decisively in our bodies, manifesting in speech and gesture, materializing as force in the world the unifying energy of our perceptions. 

To center and be centered is to be connected with the body. It’s about being aware of it and using it to our advantage to create, as Liz Duarte shows in her video on centering clay on the potter’s wheel.

Solange is very connected to and aware of her body. It plays a huge role in her visuals, and she has talked about it a lot in interviews.

So much of this whole project is about my body. It’s one thing to feel with your spirits and another to actually feel it with your body. Repetition is a way to reinforce those mantras.” ‘When I Get Home’, then, is in part about feeling unmoored from yourself and the need to re-center. - Solange

She is always moving, always using her body to fill space, to translate words, to connect with the (universe) holy ghost figure, her ancestors. Her constant movement is repetitive and visually leads her back home to Houston and to a reimagined future where Black people can exist on their own terms (shout-out Afrofuturism!).

When art is done with the body in mind (by pottery, dancing, acting, singing, etc), we can (through centering) see how “art creates a bridge between being and embodiment,” supporting the idea that by tending to the body and creation, we can all enter our own centering practices.

This “bridge” is not always circular; it can be a line, a triangle, or any other shape. This understanding of centering also leads us back to how the term is most commonly used in wellness practices like yoga, meditation, and breathwork. The point is that the mind and body become connected.

Speaking of wellness practices and the body, the “Nothing Without Intention (interlude)” from When I Get Home speaks to the merging of the two modes of centering laid out by Richards and wellness practitioners.

In Segment 9, I use it to call attention to Solange’s movement and to how intentionally it is executed across her visuals. I think it highlights the importance of centering — it must be done with intention. Similarly, segment 8 shows the value of doing with intention — it leads you back to yourself and into the “magic” within. 

Just as Solange’s body is always moving and Richards describes the constant dialogue of centering, so too does the circle motif (which we will take more about next) reinforce the loop (of time, of the body) of centering.

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“Creative work is a training of each individual’s perception according to the level on which he is alive and awake; that is why it is so difficult to evaluate. And it should be difficult. In art, perception is embodied: in dust, in pigment, in sounds, in movements of the body, in metals and stone, in threads and stuff. Each product, each goal, is an intermediate moment in a much longer journey of the person. Once I was asked to write something about art, I wrote: "Art is an intuitive act of the spirit in its evolution toward divine nature.” Because it is an act of self education in this sense, it cannot be evaluated apart from its maker, the ones whose vision it represents.“ (Richards, 1989, p25).