Promotions for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album were recently projected onto several museums in New York City ahead of its hotly anticipated release on March 29.
Among those institutions were the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, New Museum, and the Museum of Arts and Design. The Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda was projected with the phrases: “This ain’t a country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.”
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The lines are quotes from an Instagram post from Beyoncé on March 19 detailing her thoughts about the country music genre, how she did not feel welcomed by musicians working within it, and the criticism she experienced before becoming the first Black woman with a #1 single on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
The singer posted an Instagram story on Wednesday night highlighting the coordinates of the museum.
The cover image of Cowboy Carter features Beyoncé dressed as a rodeo queen, riding side-saddle on a white horse while holding the American flag. This image was also projected onto the exteriors of the New Museum, the Whitney Museum, as well as the Museum of Arts and Design on Wednesday night.
The Guggenheim’s own Instagram account acknowledged the musician’s fanbase with a post on the morning of March 21 about Franz Marc’s 1910 painting Three Horses Drinking that led with “This ain’t Texas.” The same sentence is the opening line of “Texas Hold ‘Em,” the co-lead single of Cowboy Carter.
However, an official statement from the Guggenheim emailed to ARTnews said the institution “was not informed about and did not authorize this activation. However, we invite the public—including Beyoncé and her devoted fans—to visit the museum May 16–20 when we present projections by artist Jenny Holzer on the facade of our iconic building to celebrate the opening of her major exhibition.”
Some fans online also noted that the Guggenheim’s current exhibition, “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” is a presentation of “more than 100 works by a group of 28 artists, the majority of whom are Black and more than half of whom are women.”
Beyoncé’s previous incorporation of a museum during an album launch was in 2018, when she and Jay-Z released their collaborative album Everything Is Love and a video for the song “Apeshit.” Much of the video was filmed at the Louvre in Paris and included dramatic shots of numerous masterpieces from the museum’s collection, including the Mona Lisa. The museum’s website still features a self-guided tour of the highlights from the “Apeshit” video.
Representatives for the other New York museums did not immediately respond to requests for comment from ARTnews.
Update, March 21, 2024: updated after publication to include a statement from the Guggenheim Museum Press Office.
Source: artnews.com