Solange Knowles on "A Seat at the Table," Her Next Project, and Her Legacy

Imagine an oil reservoir, deep beneath the streets of Sydney, Australia. Originally used during the Second World War, it is now a part of the Art Gallery of New South Wales where patrons can descend a grand, imposing spiral staircase to a performance space. Appearing tonight: a 10-piece ensemble on a red-lit, cross-shaped stage and one of the singular global pop stars of the past decade, Solange, née Solange Knowles. During the course of the evening, she’ll lift a hose to fill a clear tub (that she designed herself), step inside for a bath, and get dressed. But before it all begins, as the crowd files in, they hear only a mix of ambient sound, the voice of the artist Autumn Knight, and the voice of Solange herself.

“There were moments I just stood there in silence,” Solange tells me a few months later. “When people entered the space, they didn’t notice that I was there. [When they did] they had to adjust to the uncomfortableness of me just existing, not entertaining or delivering or slaying.” It’s hard to insist on the value of silence when our current culture demands, constantly, that one speak.

“A lot of my projects are asking questions,” she continues. “With this last piece, I had so many questions about what performance could be, how it could be in service to me.”

Solange’s projects are legion. Taken together, if you don’t look for context, they can seem a little scattered. In the past few years alone, she has announced a glassware line, a book on the queer Black woman architect Amaza Lee Meredith, and partnerships with performance spaces around the world. In addition to the project in Sydney, she curated Eldorado Ballroom,a music performance series for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and also became the second Black woman to compose a score for New York City Ballet. Most of these endeavors are conducted under the banner of her multidisciplinary creative group and agency, Saint Heron, which also runs a library of texts by Black creatives and serves as a conduit for Solange to work with like-minded conspirators. Fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, a friend of hers, says, “I feel like there’s not many people who are able to show up in different spaces with such integrity.”

This helps to explain Solange’s near-cultish appeal across genres; when she shows up, so do her people. Gina Duncan, the president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, who gave the go-ahead for Eldorado Ballroom (named after the famed music venue in Houston’s Third Ward), says, “When I would go to the shows, I would encounter people who were like, ‘I don’t actually know what is going to happen, but I’m here for it.’ She found a community that was already there but was hungry for something more. That’s something that not many people can do well.”

The unexpected swerves seem integral to Solange’s way in the world. In our conversation, she tells me how her interests flow from a love of drums and her upcoming staging of the Black classical composer Julia Perry’s percussion-heavy chamber work “Homunculus C.F.” to bird-watching at an owl sanctuary outside of Boston. “The entire ecosystem can shift in a moment’s time based off of a sound,” she says. “It really enlightens the hope and the faith that I need to have to exist in this world.” It’s a ravenous artistic imagination, one that relishes its restlessness.

All of Solange’s projects speak to her deep curiosity about the past—both big, era-spanning questions of Black history and the more intricate, obscure maze of family history. This takes on added resonance when you consider that Solange is a member of one of the reigning families of musical innovation and pop culture, who has the global phenomenon Beyoncé for a sister and the cultural juggernaut Jay-Z for a brother-in-law. What can a person take from the past as she seeks to understand herself? And what can she leave behind?

It’s fitting, then, that we meet in a library. More surprising is that Solange has chosen to meet me in a public library in the small town on the East Coast that she moved to a few years ago, looking to get closer to nature. “The more that I immerse myself in the soil,” she says, “the more clarity in these answers that I’ve been looking for my whole life is revealed.” She is wearing a two-tone paneled pantsuit in tan and cream by Wandler, and the look reminds me of a minimalist rodeo star.

When I first arrived, Solange’s publicist and the head librarian told me she had suggested we talk in the library’s front reading room, where I could see two teenagers poring over manga, headphones firmly plugged in. But the librarian nixed that idea because the older guys who hang out in the library during the day would probably complain about the noise. They most likely wouldn’t notice one of the most influential pop musicians of the past decade. Later, though, when our time together is done and Solange is upstairs by the circulation desk, asking for a copy of a flyer about an upcoming exhibit on local Black history, I catch one older Black man register her presence and politely smile and nod his head, as if to welcome a neighbor.

We end up settling in the records room in the basement. She and I sit in wooden captain’s chairs, while all around us are piled blue cloth binders labeled “water regulations,” with dates going back decades. The room smells like aging paper and bookbinding glue—a joy for an archivist. Solange is, after all, as is widely documented on her own social-media channels and on the Saint Heron site, drawn to the archival, the deep cut.

Her interest in archives seems like a twin to her interest in performance. It is part of the history of herself. “You know, I did a lot of child acting in my teenage years,” she tells me. “I used to dance for Destiny’s Child. I had my first album at 16 [2002’s Solo Star]. I’ve been a performer more than anything for a very long time.”

Now, she continues, “I show up in performance as myself. Fifteen years ago, the idea was to show up in costumes.” This reminds me of a quote from the Black punk pioneer Felice Rosser. She spoke of the reason she, as a Black woman artist, was drawn to punk: It didn’t require, like so many Black arts traditions, that you had to have been the best singer in your church choir. It asked for the opposite: the willingness to make art outside of the punishing ethos of mastery. It’s that other way of thinking about creativity that drew Solange to the work of Autumn Knight, who cocreated the sound piece for her show in Australia.

Knight was “another Black woman giving me permission to exist in performance without breaking my back, hyperventilating afterward, without feeling so emotionally drained and mentally exhausted. Without the disease of perfectionism and all of these things that I experienced through touring since I was 13.”

Part of who she is, of course, is a Grammy-winning musician and songwriter. In 2016, after two earlier albums, Solange released the generation-defining A Seat at the Table. Since the Civil Rights movement, every decade in American popular music has seen an R&B album that serves as a bellwether for larger political and social questions, from Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On to Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation to Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun and, of course, Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album, which launched a million think pieces on feminism. A Seat at the Table stood proudly in this tradition, with the lead single “Cranes in the Sky” capturing the spiritual desolation of being Black and coming of age in late-stage capitalism, in the ideological ruins of a post–Civil Rights America. The album and its aesthetic—a cool minimalism deeply grounded in Black arts traditions—was instantly iconic, even in this hyperfractionated age.

Solange is someone who could be a more commercial brand but has eschewed that for the trickier, scarier project of pushing the limits of self-determination. This would have been difficult for pop musicians a generation ago, but in the age of the algorithm, when TikTok makes or breaks an artist and music criticism has come to mean listing how many units sold, such idiosyncrasy is rarely rewarded. In fact, it’s often gleefully punished. Just look at the baffled disgust from the various writers and influencers who consider themselves the hip-hop press when André 3000 released a flute album late last year. But as Solange tells me, living an artistic life in service to herself means “there are very few regrets that I have in my career.” One regret she does have, though, is “that I was supposed to work with [comedian] Katt Williams on A Seat at the Table. I went to his show, went backstage to ask him. Honestly, I fumbled the ball. But he is singular.”

Even before A Seat at the Table, Solange’s name stood as a byword for artistic credibility. When her second solo album, Sol-Angel & the Hadley St. Dreams, widely considered her artistic breakthrough, came out in 2008, I remember the whitest man I’ve ever met, a man who tried to tell me that Toni Morrison didn’t know how to write about warfare, dropping Solange’s name and identifying her as “this really cool artist, I don’t know if you know her.” “Oh,” I remember thinking at the time, “even these types of guys understand how good she is.”

Even before that, she cowrote one of the songs that I, as a chronicler of the constrictive corset of Black excellence, find the most compelling in her sister’s catalog—“Why Don’t You Love Me”—a flourish of a pop tantrum in which the song’s speaker is incredulous that her perfectionism cannot dictate actual human emotions and responses from her lover. The singer is dumbfounded that public acclaim doesn’t translate to emotional intimacy with a loved one, and so she spirals into a perfectly vocally executed meltdown.

“It’s such a pure feeling that she’s really tapped into,” Solange’s friend and frequent collaborator Tyler, the Creator tells me. They worked together on her follow-up to A Seat at the Table,the 2019 album When I Get Home.“I think that’s why I liked her, because [her art] wasn’t based on chasing any zeitgeist, whether it was something political or like, yeah, I’m down like a fucking undercover cop. She’s not an undercover cop. She’s just her, and she makes whatever she wants. I feel like 80 percent of artists with these opportunities to put something out don’t do that because they’re chasing numbers. She got daughters…like, it’s a lot of them out there that’s not citing her.”

And then, because I’m curious and a little messy: “Who do you see as her daughters?”

“I ain’t even going to do that,” Tyler says, laughing. But then he explains, “I don’t even say that like an egotistical ‘pay your dues.’ She is very important in the landscape, and I don’t think that people are gonna fully give her her due until some time from now, which is okay. Because her music is going to still, 20 years from now, be a thing.”

If you grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, site of the city’s Black Panthers chapter, a neighborhood renowned for its creativity and deeply committed to the lessons of history, you probably grew up seeing the Sankofa symbol. In the ’80s and ’90s, as Black communities attempted to keep alive the revolutionary spirits of the ’60s and ’70s, the Sankofa adinkra—a bird with her head turned around over her back—was everywhere, an explicit reminder that a way forward is impossible without looking back to the past.

This may explain why Solange is so enamored with history. But there is history with a capital H, the thing that shapes cities and moves whole groups of people, and then there’s the twisty, intimate history of family, which often follows its own logic.

“A Seat at the Table, and the work that went into it, was all about origin: finding the way that history was generationally repeating itself or evolving and all of the ways that I found those stories within me,” Solange tells me. In the five years since her last release, however, she’s been thinking about her own “origin story,” she says, doing the deep therapeutic work of understanding her younger self and forgiving her.

For Solange, the story is complicated by a childhood defined by others’ perceptions of her. “When I was 10, we moved from my childhood home,” she says. “Classic Black sort of scenario: Something happened with the storage, and all of our childhood photos were stolen. And so the only pictures or videos I have come from other people: aunts, cousins, people at my mama’s hair salon, other kids’ parents.” What does that do to one’s sense of self?

When Solange speaks to me, she holds eye contact for long stretches of time. It’s an interesting gaze to be subjected to. It’s not an expression of dominance or a tic of media training but one of genuine scrutiny. Toward the end of our talk, she says, suddenly, “Your eye shadow is very subtle. I like it.” I’m startled. The eye shadow in question is a very faint smudge applied with my pinkie hours before because my daughter had hidden my makeup brush. That is to say, it’s a flick of color that could only be seen if one was making a study of my face. It’s a reminder that as much as Knowles has lived a life in public, she has always been looking intently back.

“There was a lot of loneliness in my teenage years,” Solange says. “A lot of the work I do speaks to that loneliness and weighs that connectivity. This was, you know, prior to social media. I would be on the road for long stretches of time, mainly with adults or older people.”

Touring so much necessarily meant moving through concert halls and music venues—big, dramatic spaces. “They intrigued me,” she explains. “I felt like I belonged there and that I could one day create a space that felt like that or embody the way that felt through a song or a project.”

Understanding space is how she understands her relationship to others. The musician Steve Lacy tells me that one of the ways she has shown up for him as a friend has been to offer to decorate his house. “Clean, futuristic, classic, Black” is how he describes her style. The two worked together on her follow-up to A Seat at the Table, When I Get Home.“We could be doing something really intense musically, but it still feels really fun. We’re laughing and telling stories, and she just holds it down. She feels like home.”

One of the upcoming projects Solange is most excited to talk about is the book on Amaza Lee Meredith, who designed homes for Black vacationers in Sag Harbor, New York, in the 1930s and ’40s, developing a community called Azurest North. She and her companion, Edna Meade Colson, lived in a house that Meredith designed called Azurest South, a sleek, modernist building that sits adjacent to the campus of the historically Black college Virginia State University. For the book memorializing her work that she is editing, Solange went through Meredith’s papers at the university. She says her obsession with Meredith started with Googling anything and everything she could find about her. “I love the internet,” she says, then adds slyly, “I be on that bitch too much.”

Larissa Hofmann

Solange sees part of her legacy as “taking care of the work that I’m doing so that people will be able to come directly to the source when they want to know my story.” She’s frightened, she says, when she “thinks about institutions having all of the evidence of our existence, specifically Black artists.” I mention to her the recent scandal of a group of white TikTokers breaking into the Howard University School of Divinity’s unsecured archive and filming themselves rifling through books and records dating back to the 1860s, and she shudders. “It scares me that there are so many people doing important work, and it’s all on this digital print,” she says, meaning that it can even more easily be lost. Preservation “feels like such important work right now in the present. I think about all of the ways that the world that I’m building has tangible evidence.”

A mark on the world is what drew her to glassblowing and her collaboration with the artist Jason McDonald. A few years ago, she went on a retreat. “I was supposed to have all of this enlightenment and whatever,” she says, wryly. “And I didn’t take much from the program, but I found a glassblowing studio there. The lessons I learned with this material—it’s constantly evolving. The moment you become still, it’s over. …You have to surrender yourself to the song and dance of this material. So much of my life has been about control and needing to control my own story. Through glassblowing, I had to surrender to this other material’s story.” The glasses she ends up making are “an embodiment of this one little day that was about improving myself in some way. Maybe on the surface it just looks like a cocktail glass. But it’s really about creating a spirit within an object. So much of what I’m being pulled by now is making sure that there is physical evidence of my legacy, making sure that I have tangible objects and history that people can hold in their hands as an embodiment of who I am and how I showed up in the world.”

I find this quote very beautiful, but I am also aware that there are those who would not understand it. I think Solange knows this too. A little later, when I carefully avoid asking her what new music she might be working on and instead ask her what sounds she currently is obsessed with, she says “the tuba” and then grins at her own audacity. “I love it. I’ve started writing music for the tuba, and I am trying to talk myself into releasing it, but I can only imagine the eye rolls from people being like, this bitch hasn’t made an album.”

But even the fancifulness of the tuba is grounded in a desire for some sort of authenticity. “It sounds like what the gut feels like to me,” she says. “There’s a way that it takes up space that you can’t deny, and it also just feels very Black to me.”

This article originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of Harper’s Bazaar.

SUBSCRIBE

Hair: Jawara for Oribe and Dyson; makeup: Miguel Ramos for Addiction Tokyo; manicure: Dawn Sterling for NailGlam; production: AP Studio, Inc; set design: Matt Jackson. Special thanks to WSA NY.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qa3RqZyrq5KWx6Kt0WeaqKVfmMKtwNSrnGiZoql6o7vOpKpmpaWotqR7wG1tb3Bjan95e9Koo5qml5p6rLrOsKOeq12eu7Wx0a%2Bgnq9dZ31zgI4%3D