“I’m pursuing the path of a mogul, quite frankly,” SOL said, regarding her dreams. “I want to be able to act upon all of my creative imaginations.”
After graduating from Harvard College, multidisciplinary artist Treasure Faith Brooks ’22 reinvented herself as SOL. “It was a process of self-possession and self-sovereignty, because I’ve been in institutions for so long,” she said.
One year ago, SOL co-founded a creative strategy firm called Sol Street Strategy. They advise companies on branding and strategic direction to scale internationally. They are also producing an original documentary-style television show. “Sol Street is sort of an imaginative place, like a literal street where we’re architecting the most ambitious, innovative ideas for the 22nd century. So we want to scale things bigger, to high ethical and creative standards, and we want them to last,” she explained.
SOL is an artist in ascent. She produced content for the Democratic National Convention and is speaking at the Ford Foundation for advancing human welfare, followed by her first month-long postgraduate artist residency to generate creative work for the upcoming year. After the 2024 U.S. presidential election in November, she will interview Frank Bruni, a political journalist for The New York Times, regarding how colleges can promote dialogue between students with opposing viewpoints.
“I’m just called upon,” she said, when asked how she finds such opportunities. “I tried to go into full-time work at a company here or there. But for one reason or another, I just felt like if I have enough patience and enough courage, and I’m savvy enough with this, then I can be self-employed and make this happen.”
Growing up, SOL attended performing arts schools. At fourteen, she went to boarding school in New York City, where she continued to train as a dancer and actor. She studied to become a professional dancer, attending summer intensives and apprenticeships under soloists from Alvin Ailey American Ballet Theater. But she learned that there is a small window of opportunity to dance professionally, and classical ballerinas typically do not attend college.
SOL, however, made the last-minute decision to attend Middlebury College, shocking her ballet company. There she studied gender, sociology, and international politics, while becoming known for political activism.
Despite spending most of her time on campus organizing, SOL explained, “I would still have this itch to be creative, and meld my intellectual capacities with my political activism with my creativity.” During her time at Middlebury, she co-founded a small media publication called Problematic. She planned to drop out and pursue Problematic full-time, but a mentor convinced her to apply to Harvard.
SOL, following her mentor’s advice, subsequently transferred to Harvard and concentrated in Art, Film, and Visual Studies. “I think I’ve always just been guided by the fact that I want to contribute to improving the world and helping people, and I want to be creative,” she said. “I think a lot of my classes, obviously being in AFVS, were creatively oriented. Which kind of gave me my fix.”
SOL contributed to “different creative enclaves” during college. While at Harvard, she co-founded a feminist media company called The Meteor. She joined student organizations like Eleganza, an annual fashion show, Omo Naija, an African dance troupe, and EXP, a competitive hip-hop team.
At Harvard, parts of the creative community felt exclusive. “I think that Harvard operates on a system where you have to punch, and you need to comp…honestly, it’s very bureaucratic,” SOL disclosed. “I felt like at the age that I was at, I was ready to just create and make and be my own person. I recognize that not everybody was necessarily at that point in their creative journey.”
Still, she nurtured intimate friendships with like-minded artists Shavonna Jackson ’22 and Mai Anna Pacheco ’23. They created a punk collective called Aw Sookie Sookie Now, which expressed political resistance through “party and play”—parties, street fairs, and support group circles. “I think that our artistic heartbeats made us feel like we don’t want to be isolated from people,” she said.
During senior year, SOL mentored the nascent Black Arts Collective by helping a group of first-years launch the organization. But by then, her professional ambitions took precedence. She produced, directed, and spoke for TED and Teen Vogue. She created film, video, and audio for live events, voting campaigns, advertisements, and podcasts. “I feel like I was trying to build my professional career simultaneous to being an undergrad, so I didn’t have that much time or bandwidth,” she explained.
After graduation, SOL moved to London for six months. She lived with Pacheco, who was studying abroad for her last semester. While Pacheco established herself in the international music scene, attracting fans and committing to weekly studio sessions and performances, SOL realized their artistic visions differed.
“I really realized that whole avenue of creatively producing things in a corporate capacity like [Pacheco], in a more popular culture space—I was like, ‘I’m not that.’ I think I’m an avant-garde artist. I think my voice is experimental. It’s radical. It’s not super commercial, and I want to keep it that way,” SOL said.
Last year, Instagram named SOL in their inaugural “Future Makers” series, highlighting Gen Z artists and changemakers, in recognition of her avant-garde artistry. She created “Happy Birthday Private Person,” a moving-image installation with spoken word poetry, which they featured on the platform.
From there, she went on to co-found Sol Street Strategy with Jackson. The creative strategy firm evolved from their undergraduate collective Aw Sookie Sookie Now and is currently in the startup phase. “What we’re doing now was pollinated in college, in the relationships we built out there.”
SOL thinks critically about the market for cultural productions. “I have friends who I graduated with, and we’ve had these—dialecticals is what I’ll call them—of them being like, ‘Why do you need visibility? And why do things need money?’ There’s a whole starving artist complex that is seen as having valor, and as someone who comes from poverty, I don’t believe in that,” she said. “It’s a market, and we deserve to value our offerings appropriately to the rarity that they offer.”
Instead of gravitating toward self-promotion, SOL believes in naming your aspirations. “It’d be great if we lived in a world where people pick you, and they go, ‘Hey, I see this for you! I see a dream you’re too afraid to say!’ But I’m just now getting to the point in my creative career where I’m ready to raise my hand and say what I want, so that the people who are interested in helping scale these dreams—because they are big and they are ambitious—can step in and help me to do so,” she declared.
On the other hand, SOL warns young creatives against chasing fame. “Celebrity relies on attention. When you think about how long you can hold an attention span, that’s an intense thing to contemplate. In fact, it’ll drive you mad.” Rather, she believes that “it’s a lifelong journey. I’m always going to be an artist, and I refuse to not be a working artist.”
Growing up in performing arts schools, SOL watched many get their big break. The temptation of envy was always there, but she realized that the key was staying focused on her own clear vision. “When you really, really narrow in on what you—especially if you are an artist—want, then you’re also a visionary, which means that it hasn’t really been done before. So the more specific you can get, and the more tailored your dreams become to you, then the less sense of intimidation or competition you’ll experience,” SOL said.
She values creative expansion beyond insular spheres of influence. “I think as artists, especially as artists from Harvard, it’s really critical for the sake of making potent art that you break that supposed bubble, and step out and collaborate with artists from different walks of life, and go as far as fast as you can.”
SOL urges young artists to continue refining their craft. “It’s not a question of if the opportunity will come. The real question is, when it comes, will you be ready?”
Kya Brooks ’25 (kyabrooks@college.harvard.edu) writes Arts for the Independent.