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As could be expected from a girl with two names, Taylor McLendon (or Ivy Sole) is a multifaceted person. A poet, a mural painter, a singer-songwriter and a manager, she is an artist in Wharton with incredible talent matched by incredible modesty.
Ivy Sole was initially just a rapper, a name and persona Taylor chose to perform with that she could take on and off as she wished. Now, most people know Taylor as Ivy and her artistic persona and personal identity have become inextricable. This unlikely synthesis is characteristic of Ivy’s existence.
“My story is fragmented and colorful,” she explains. “Similarly to a mosaic.”
FROM
CAROLINA TO COLLABORATION
Even if you’re not on first name(s) basis with Ivy, you’ve likely heard her deep, rough-edged voice projected from stages across campus and beyond. In her four years at Penn, Ivy has performed at The Rotunda, the Annenberg Center, St. Elmo’s back garden and the Fling Lower Quad stage, among other places, as a member of many performing arts groups. Ivy is a poet for spoken-word group The Excelano Project, a dancer in African Rhythms, a vocal feminist of the Vagina Monologues and a songwriter, manager and rapper for Liberal Arts, the hip-hop group she started with four friends.
But to this day, Ivy’s most memorable performance at Penn remains her first: rapping onstage with Kendrick Lamar when the Social Planning and Events Committee brought him to Annenberg in November 2011. Then a freshman who had just arrived from Charlotte, S.C., Ivy had met Kendrick several months earlier when she sneaked backstage at his concert with a friend.
“I gave him a USB stick with a recording I’d made,” she said. “Not even a CD like a regular person — Kendrick got files.”
Ivy thought that was that until two months later, to her surprise, Lamar recognized her in the Annenberg audience. Remembering her voice, Kendrick brought her up on stage to perform with him.
“It’s pretty hard to top that,” she laughs.
Leaning back on a bench on the porch of the Kelly Writers’ House, however, Ivy is at once introspective and not at all self-conscious. She has a warm, serious demeanor and exudes laid-back vibes that belie her struggles and successes, her passion and the rich depth of emotion from which she crafts her art.
Ivy channels her creativity through the entire spectrum of artistic media. Her expression takes many forms, but her biggest project has been the five-piece band Liberal Arts.
“Ivy brought us together,” Kevin Rugamba, the group’s vocalist and a senior in the College, acknowledges.
Ivy heard something individually in four of her friends, and her sophomore summer reached out to Rugamba as well as Devin Hobdy, Chris Croft and Xander Goldman to collaborate. Liberal Arts’ sound is somewhere between hip-hop and neo-soul. This unclassified genre mash-up defines the group’s central mission.
For the members of the group, hip-hop is common ground, but they each individually bring their own sound to the mix. Hobdy brings an acoustic sensibility. Ivy comes from a tight-knit network of underground hip-hop in the South: neo-soul and R&B. Rugamba loves reggae, bringing Bob Marley vibes. And Goldman has been listening to hip-hop since he first heard Tupac when he was nine years old. The result is dynamic, soulful music that sounds exactly like what it is: a collaboration between friends.
“The beauty of the group is the fusing of our different backgrounds,” Rugamba said. “That’s life, eh?”
SYMBIOSIS
Penn’s unofficial motto is plagiarism of David Guetta: “Work hard, play hard.” For Ivy, it’s hard to draw the line.
As is the case with Liberal Arts, there’s a general overlap between her social and creative lives, between her friends and her collaborators. It’s certainly the case with Victoria Ford, one of Ivy’s closest friends and this year’s director of the Vagina Monologues and The Excelano Project, both productions that Ivy performed in. Ford recalls the beginning of their friendship, living in Harrison College House their freshman year.
“I was a big hermit at first, and Ivy was hella popular because she got onstage with Kendrick,” Ford said. “She was my first friend though — she introduced me to society, showed me where the turn up was at.”
Getting into Excelano that fall directed the course of their relationship: Making poetry, both apart and together, was an exercise in vulnerability. For Ford, that was about “my relationship with my mom, boys, my queerness — I grew into those things with Ivy.”
Meanwhile, the reason Liberal Arts can make music together is the same reason they became friends in the first place: the group jives.
“Our songs come from being together, hearing the same energy and channeling it,” Ivy explains. “You know when a vibration hits the air, and it takes your mind somewhere?”
“We were friends first and that’s important because we’re honest with each other,” Rugamba added.
Given the busy lives of the Liberal Arts members, they don’t see as much of each other as they would like, Kevin notes. But they are hopeful that will change next year when, if all goes to plan, Liberal Arts will be living all together in a house in West Philadelphia.
For a lot of people in this city, Philadelphia is like an airport: a place to pass through en route elsewhere, but not the destination. Ivy sees the trend but thinks that the city’s vitality and affordability is creating a space for urban renewal and development in the city.
“People are trying to get to New York City and that brings a lot of talent and ambition, but it’s temporary,” Ivy says. “If you talk to the locals, they know this city is dope, and they’re trying to convince people to stay.”
For the time being, that’s the plan. The members of Liberal Arts are looking for jobs to support themselves before their music can. Looking ahead, Ivy’s attitude towards work ethic and risk-taking shares a lot with the startup mentality.
“You hustle and you work so hard because you believe in the product, that your investment will be returned,” she explains, “I believe in Liberal Arts.”
Using a corporate vocabulary to talk about her music reflects Ivy’s symbiotic understanding of art and business. Admittedly, she’s far from the conventional Wharton trope heading to Wall Street post-graduation. But majoring in the individualized concentration of Management and Consulting of Expressive Cultures, Ivy has forged a specialized education that matches her specialized interests.
She believes her Wharton classes have prepared her for an independent career in the music industry: “I’m not going to walk into an agency and let someone else dictate what my music is because I can articulate that myself,” she says.
As much as the education, Ivy appreciates the network that branches from Wharton, especially into the music industry, and includes Hoodie Allen, Kids in the Hall and Homeboy Sandman among its alumnae.
Although Ivy’s experience at Penn has been formative, she’s never been restricted or defined by the campus and her art has taken her far from the Penn bubble. Ivy has only performed locally, but through digital media her music has disseminated far beyond its point of genesis. Her cover of “Free Fallin” has been played more than 122,000 times on SoundCloud and retweeted around the globe.
"Our songs come from being together, hearing the same energy and channelling it."
-Taylor McLendon/Ivy Sole
LOVING YOURSELF
Last semester, Ivy’s artistic ambition took her to Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the semester to execute an urban mural as a Gilman International Scholar. But Ivy found herself suffocating. In a city of strangers, she felt isolated, especially at the time of the Ferguson trial.
“Brazil taught me a great deal about patience,” she reflects. “I was away from my creative group and my community where I could have an adequate response to the events that were happening. It was a very difficult way to learn about patience.”
She completed the mural and a corresponding one in Philadelphia. It depicts a garden and the script: “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”
The quote reflects Ivy’s motivation in creating art: She is inspired by “the community of black Americans hoping to pursue their dreams and achieve their goals,” but often set back by poverty, violence and intolerance. Through her work and expression, Ivy is hoping to enact change on an individual level.
“I believe that I can be an example and that I am one of many black students who carry this burden and blessing,” she said.
On Penn’s campus, too, she feels that common hardship has lead to a lot of unity in the black community. She echoes a resounding sentiment that, on account of her skin color, her “place on this campus isn’t always respected.”
Citing controversies such as Phi Delta Theta’s Christmas card, when brothers posed with a Beyonce sex doll, and Beta Theta Pi’s 2014 “gangsta” mixer, she expresses frustration that the response of Penn’s black community to these events is constantly being questioned by their peers and institution.
But Ivy has found sisterhood in this community as a member of Penn’s chapter of Delta Sigma Theta. There are five current members of DST, including Ivy’s good friend Jade Parker, a senior in the College and the chapter’s vice president. For Jade, the sorority is about “creating security and belonging for black women in a predominantly white space.”
Ivy is fighting against the marginalization of black women as a black woman. She’s addressing the very social structures that have defined her own existence. Although her work has political grounding, it is ultimately personal. She quotes an Excelano alumna who stated, “The more detailed a story, the more universal it is.” Ivy wants to tell the most detailed story. For her, a story about overcoming oppression is a story about loving yourself first.
“There are entities in place telling me I shouldn’t love myself,” she says. “Blackness is part of that.”
When asked if she loves herself, she smiled. “Most days,” she said.
The love and respect Ivy is cultivating for herself is reflected in the people who surround her. Ivy’s greatest supporter has always been her mother. “She has to have credit in believing I could come to Penn before I even knew what Penn was,” Ivy said. “She worked two jobs for as long as I can remember so that I can be here.”
Her mother introduced Ivy to music as a little kid and her unwavering confidence translates into Ivy’s quiet, steady-handed self-assurance.
A lot of love and pride come from Ivy’s best friends too. “The other day, we were sitting around, and another girl said, ‘I wish I were here when John Legend was here,’” Ford recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Why are you saying that? You’re sitting next to Ivy!’”
Ivy’s poetry and lyrics address challenges she’s faced both internally and externally. She sings about her heart breaking and feeling uncertain about the future. She performed a poem about not seeing or speaking to her father in years. But Ivy hasn’t always been so transparent through her art. Her longest friend at Penn and fellow Wharton senior Alex Wiggins has seen Ivy change over the past four years.
“The biggest difference is that she’s opened up more — she’s let herself be vulnerable, and that’s big,” she said, adding that they used to joke that Alex always cried and Ivy never cried.
“The distinction isn’t so obvious anymore,” Alex reflects. “But she’s always been on her own path. She was on it when we met as freshmen, and she’s still on it today.”
It’s clear that Ivy will not let anyone dictate who she is and what she creates. When she chose the name Ivy Sole for herself, in an act of self-determination, she chose her identity for the artist she would become.
“Ivy can grow on anything,” she explains. “And that’s just how I think of my art.”
