ART: Solange Unveils "Seventy States" at Tate Modern

Solange has unveiled a new digital interactive work called “Seventy States” at the Tate Modern gallery in London.

Taking its name from a line in “Cranes in the Sky”, “Seventy States” was created in collaboration with artist Carlota Guerrero, who also provided art and creative direction on A Seat at the Table and the “Cranes” music video. It presents unreleased content and concepts from those works, and dovetails with many of the themes of Solange’s last album. Says the lady herself:

"During the creation of A Seat at the Table and my deeper exploration into my own identity...I couldn't answer my own question, if I had a responsibility as an artist to also express optimism in the midst of working through so much of my own healing. I decided to do this through a visual language. I wanted to create this language to help me to get closer to the balance I yearned to be closer to and express. I wanted to create a meditation and mediation using movement, repetition, symmetry, color theory, landscape and scenography, as my own individualised protest."

[caption id="attachment_93397" align="alignnone" width="1283"] A screenshot from "Seventy States"[/caption]

For her interactive piece, Solange sought inspiration from a luminary of the Black Arts Movement: Betye Saar, whose provocative assemblages of surreal folk art have awed since the late 1950s.

[caption id="attachment_93405" align="alignleft" width="2048"] Betye Saar[/caption]

Along with Solange, Saar is featured prominently within the Tate’s Soul of A Nation: Art in The Age Of Black Power show. The exhibition focuses on the black artistic renaissance that arose out of the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s. It runs at the Tate until October 22nd.