Grammy-winning Chance the Rapper blends the sonic and the visual (in an all-new way) with his latest project, Star Line.

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The 31-year-old Chicago-born and Grammy-winning artist, known for his work on songs including “No Problem” and “I’m The One” and for being a coach on The Voice, is in the process of delivering his latest project, titled Star Line. But he’s not going about it in a conventional, music-industry-standard way. Far from it. Instead, he’s releasing fragments of it in slow-burning real time. During our Zoom interview in October, he calls these interstitial drops “practice points and proofs of concept.”

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Star Line’s material is highly collaborative and interdisciplinary, blending music and art and—importantly—a sense of community (more on this momentarily). The endeavor started with 2022’s “Child of God,” a multifaceted piece consisting of both a track and original artwork with the Gabonese artist Naïla Opiangah, whom Chance met on a trip to Ghana. It premiered at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Star Line’s most recent arrival this past August came in the form of “3,333,” an introspective and candid track looking back at Chance’s career with complementary artwork provided by his 9-year-old daughter, Kensli. There have been several other components, including the track “The Highs & Lows” featuring Joey Bada$$ flanked with artwork by the Gabonese photographer Yannis Davy Guibinga. As it happens, that piece premiered at Art Basel in Switzerland.

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It’s an experimental approach that allows fans to see mostly clearly through the window and speak about his process. Chance describes it as “feeling like an artist in residency, and I’ve been in residency for the past few years making a ton of works. It’s cool because, while this has happened, people get to see sneak peeks of the thesis.” He adds: “I don’t think anybody’s seen any of the works in the final show.”

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What he’s doing, though, is not exactly trial and error. It’s more so trial by instinct; Chance is putting forth a sounding board to amplify the voices of the final project, and it’s all forged by his feelings over financial or faddish motives.

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When questioned about Star Line’s next and eventual final iterations, he answers: “I guess it just depends on how I feel. … Sometimes, I’ll just be making a record without a [broader] medium in mind. I’ll just create to be creating. Those ones… they keep me sharp, and they’re part of the residency. Making hella art, some of which you won’t show.” (You’ll have noticed by now that Chance speaks of music in a gallerist’s terms, showing as opposed to releasing, streaming or playing.)

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The undertaking will not necessarily surprise Chance the Rapper’s core fans: The man rose to fame by carving his own idiosyncratic path, forgoing the backing of a label, and being open with his audiences. Now, that openness is getting even wider as he’s letting the daylight of cross-category creativity come together. The seedling for it started with words.

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“I’ve always thought of writers as being the greatest kinds of artists because they generate a vivid picture,” he says. Lyricism is similar; Chance believes his listeners, and music consumers in general, visualize songs as they’re heard.

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Chance says he hopes a future facet of Star Line’s collaborative medley will include architecture. Opiangah, his original collaborator on the venture, is also an architect. “We were talking about the parallels of how, a lot of the time, songwriters are dreaming up what they think is the livable world.” Architecture, he says, is the actualization of “real ideas” that have similar “permanence.”

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Space—physical, conversational, tangible—is a huge component of Star Line. This is where the community comes in. Chance has been hosting nationwide “multisensory experiences” to immerse his fans in his thinking. There are projectors, custom lighting rigs, special headphones and more.

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“It’s called ‘Writings on the Wall,’” he says. “I know that people need context for the eventual project. And it’s almost like a peer critique. We present everybody with notebooks, and they’re free to take notes to draw. I usually end up doing a sit-down Q&A for a while afterward.” During Art Week 2024, he’ll have hosted several such sessions.

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Chance describes his ultimate goal—the veracity in those “proofs of concept”—in a succinctly beautiful way: He’s doing all of this to “provide a story in a way that allows the listener to be the painter."