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Beyoncé spins her own bittersweet narratives into art. “I’ma rain, I’ma rain on this bitter love/Tell the sweet I’m new,” she sings on “Freedom.”
As bell hooks writes of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in her essay “Moving Beyond Pain,” to be truly free, we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal well-being and joy. In that world, the making and drinking of lemonade will be a fresh and zestful delight, a real life mixture of the bitter and the sweet, and not a measure of our capacity to endure pain, but rather a celebration of our moving beyond pain.”
If Will Cotton’s paintings—- resplendent with pure, idealized fantasy—- are the sweetness we lazily dream of, Walker’s A Subtlety is the sweetness we actually live: rearing up through centuries of hurt and exploitation, planting its feet in the good and the bad, the pleasure and the pain. It crystallizes across the surfaces of our imperfect lives, and makes us shine.
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