Solange slays Hapers Bazaar rocking her iconic fro and spilling revelation of 2020.
She told the magazine, 2020 has been both destructive and transformative. A roiling pandemic has isolated and divided us. The killings of a seemingly never-ending list of Black Americans—killed out in broad daylight or even sleeping in their own homes—have once more brought a reckoning over racism and racial justice into the forefront of the American consciousness. The toll it’s taken has come in devastating ripples, first in human lives, then on our collective livelihood—the blow it’s dealt to commerce and art has been a cruel one-two punch. As night falls earlier and longer, and a contentious election looms, it can all feel so…dark.
Through all this Solange witnessed light and resilience. She continued saying,
yet, we’ve seen light—resilience and intergenerational collaboration in the name of fighting the good fight. (Or as the late Rep. John Lewis would have said, “Getting into good trouble.”) If the moral arc of history bends towards justice, these are the people applying the pressure. We’ve seen grocers and delivery people and mail carriers become frontline workers; doctors and caregivers and scientists become our guiding stars. We’ve seen entrepreneurs and artists innovate to survive. (See: the latest offerings of a pared-down but no less creative Fashion Month.) There is still, amid our confusion and anxiety, joy.
Like all of us, musician and artist Solange Knowles has been trying to make sense of these strange and conflicting times. So we invited her to do so here, in her very own Harper’s BAZAAR digital cover. She styled herself from a hand-selected roster of all-independent, majority-BIPOC designers; she tapped friend and collaborator Naima Green to help photograph her in isolation; and for her cover story, she shares a series of powerful personal essays and poems that lay bare the private challenges and collective pain, the hard-won triumphs, and, yes, the joy that propels us all ever-forward.
We are surprised that Solange was able to pull out the revelations of 2020. Proving her strong intuitiveness and connection with humankind Solange donated 100,000 dollars to Houston in 2019. Sis has always cared.
