In April 2017, she executed the first of these compositions, named for one of the album’s tracks, “Scales,” at the Menil Collection. In this intimate performance of selected songs from the album, she choreographed minimalist dance movements and dispensed with a stage, so that she and her two backup singers (all barefoot), along with a five-piece band, were hardly separated from the audience. Others followed: “Seventy States,” named after one of her own poems, included interactive digital pieces for the Tate Modern inspired by the assemblage artist Betye Saar and her role in the Black Arts Movement; in it, Solange projected clips of herself and a few other women lying in the ocean and trekking up a mountain, some scenes of which were originally concepts for her music videos. “An Ode To” was performed in May 2017 at the Guggenheim Museum. The show opened with Solange and her few dozen dancers marching down the museum’s grand, Frank Lloyd Wright-designed spiraling ramps to the rotunda. The young black New York-based fashion designer Telfar Clemens dressed the troupe in utilitarian white and camel-colored two-pieces: “She had her hand in all aspects of the performance — from the music, choreography and styling to the documentation — and I was blown away that all of the parts came together in about two or three days,” he says. “It was a historical moment.” Solange’s sculptures, white geometric totems, completed the scene. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the audience of 450 was the crowning element: Many of them were people of color, who were requested by invitation to dress in white apparel.

With these events and others like them, Solange emerged as a legitimate multimedia artist, unveiling a kind of performer the public had not yet seen. She released herself, and her talents, from the constraints of category. She expanded the context in which her music is usually heard to include more traditional concert settings as well as the halls of high art. In doing so, she radically reframed herself, her music and representations of African-American womanhood. She understands black music and black experience as art in its own right, venue notwithstanding.

Her mission to bring largely black audiences to typically white spaces is, in itself, transformative. The Guggenheim did not host its first solo exhibition by an African-American woman until Carrie Mae Weems’s retrospective in 2014, just three years before Solange’s “An Ode To.” It would be an understatement to say that the rarefied temples of Western art have not typically been welcoming to black women’s artistry. Her efforts, Solange hopes, will set precedent for other black performers like her. In a photograph taken at the Menil show in Houston, a little black girl looks on, awe-struck. She is too young to grasp all the nuance of what she sees, but she knows it is monumental, and she knows the people doing it look like her. At a series of small performances at Vancouver’s Rennie Museum last year, the venue covered the cost for members of Black Lives Matter. “The front lines,” Solange says, “are open to my people.”

AT A PICNIC table on the scraggly grass beyond the bungalow, Solange’s all-male band gathers. She’s known some of these musicians since she was a kid; she went to middle school with one of her drummers. The men wait patiently, but I can feel their anticipation. The new album calls. The making of it has taken Solange to New Orleans (where she often lives), Jamaica, California’s Topanga Canyon and back to a kind of Houston of the mind. “There is a lot of jazz at the core,” she emailed me a few days after our meeting. “But with electronic and hip-hop drum and bass because I want it to bang and make your trunk rattle.” The sound and feel of the album are set in her mind, but this project, so close to being finished, is still very much in progress — and will be until the very end. “I like to be able to tell the story in 13 different ways, then I like to edit,” she says of her process. Many of the songs on “A Seat at the Table” were 15 minutes long until the final stages of production, when, with surgical decisiveness, Solange cut them down to three or four. She’ll do the same as she completes this yet unnamed album. The record will be warm, she says, fluid and more sensual than her last one. But, seasoned as she is, she’s still nervous. “I have this fear living in my body about releasing work,” she says. “I don’t know any artist that doesn’t feel that before they hit the send button.”

These months leading to the album’s release have been a period of reflection and preparation for the work that is to come. It is not that she has suddenly become a hybrid artist, it is that she has discovered how to execute the hybridity she has always imagined. In assembling a 2017 outdoor performance piece of “Scales” at Donald Judd’s sprawling Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex., she encountered spatial difficulties that she says gave her new perspective: “I realize how much wider, figuratively and literally, my work could be if I took myself away as subject.” She is still evolving, finding herself at that point between inspiring others with her activism and art — peers like Janelle Monáe, Questlove and Zoë Kravitz have attended her museum performances, and it was no less than Beyoncé who sang in 2013, “My sister told me I should speak my mind” — and honing her own craft.

Recently, Solange has embarked upon a kind of self-guided apprenticeship. She has been watching the director Busby Berkeley’s elaborate movie musical-production numbers from the 1930s to understand the complexities of large-scale, high-drama choreography. She studied movement with the modern dancer and choreographer Diane Madden. “I want to continue to learn about all of the mechanisms of theater,” she says. “I want to spend a month going to Vegas shows, just being backstage and learning the logistics.” Perhaps that is a sign of her performances to come. Her instructors are wide-ranging and eclectic: Joni Mitchell, in whom Solange found lessons in balancing a career as a musician with the demands of visual creation (Mitchell’s first, never abandoned love was painting); Missy Elliott, whose music videos are genre-defying and imagistically striking. Solange is drawing sonic inspiration from the ’90s singer Aaliyah, the experimental 20th-century musician and composer Sun Ra, the ’60s psychedelic soul band Rotary Connection and Stevie Wonder’s 1979 album “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.”

Now, though, it’s time for the artist to return to the work at hand. As we rise and she leads me out to the yard where we’ll say our goodbyes, I feel the tide of her focus turn toward the band. Making this record, she tells me after our parting hug, feels every bit like those long-ago Sundays in church watching the grown folk taken over by the spirit, carried off into something greater than themselves. With this alchemic mix of multivalent aesthetic expression — grounded in her blackness and, yes, her pop appeal — Solange has finally found her Holy Ghost. And now there’s no use hiding from it.

At top: Meshki top, $36, meshki.com.au. Sophie Buhai earrings. Alexis Bittar bracelets, $245 each, alexisbittar.com. Manolo Blahnik shoes, $725. Stylist provided undergarment.

Hair by Jawara at Bryant Artists using John Masters Organics. Makeup by Susie Sobol at Julian Watson Agency using Marc Jacobs Beauty. Set design by Kadu Lennox at Frank Reps.

Production: Mary-Clancey Pace at Hen’s Tooth Productions. Tailor: Dominique Jernigan at 7th Bone Tailoring. Manicure: Kelly B. using Dior Beauty. Digital tech: Jarrod Turner. Photographer’s assistants: P.J. Spaniol, Max Dworkin, Jahmad Balugo and Chen Xiangyun. Stylist’s assistants: Anna Devereux and Sharifa Morris. Hair assistant: Kashima Parris. Makeup assistant: Ayaka. Set assistants: Joanna Seitz, Jade Sorensen, Paul Anthony Smith and Olivia Barnum. Production assistants: Kat Bayard and Katie Tucker