Tau Lewis can trace where she found every remnant of old clothing and leather, rusted piece of metal, beached starfish and myriad other well-worn items that she collects and reassembles into monumental sculptures, often evoking fantastical otherworldly beings.
“I can kind of draw a map and tell you where everything came from,” Lewis said at her studio in Brooklyn earlier this summer. She was finishing five towering figures, draped in hand-sewn garments with dazzling constellations of color, pattern and texture and embedded with weathered objects. These eminences, like guardians to another realm, will hold court in Lewis’s first solo museum exhibition, “Tau Lewis: Spirit Level,” opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston on Aug. 29. The show will travel to David Zwirner’s Los Angeles gallery in February 2025.
Deeply attuned to the past lives of her materials, Lewis is working in the tradition of Black self-taught artists from the American South, including Lonnie Holley, Thornton Dial and the Gee’s Bend quilters, who have all made do with scraps at hand to construct works of extraordinary expressiveness and vitality.
Lewis, 30, has shown in prominent group exhibitions, including Prospect 5 in New Orleans in 2021 and at the Venice Biennale in 2022. At a solo New York gallery exhibition at 52 Walker in the fall of 2022, she presented her giant visages, ranging in height from 7 feet to 13 feet and inspired by Yoruban ceremonial masks. Recently, Lewis transformed parachutes, fire hoses and vinyl movie posters into oversize flowering vines that scale the facade and roof of the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver through next March.
“When I met Tau, it was like I had met a new sister that had made her way to freedom,” said Holley, the Atlanta-based artist and musician who is 74, in a conversation with Lewis moderated by the I.C.A. curator Jeffrey De Blois for the exhibition catalog. Holley met Lewis during the opening of her 2018 exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary arts center.
“We don’t all claim to be making sacrifices to our ancestors, but in a sense, that’s what I felt about her works,” Holley said.
He took Lewis to the warehouse of the Souls Grown Deep foundation in Atlanta, with hundreds of works by African American artists from the South, and encouraged her to look at Dial’s wall assemblages incorporating textiles and lean more into the use of found fabrics in her own work. Now, Holley said, she is “tearing things to pieces, just tearing them to pieces, putting them back together, looking at them in a different format than they would ever be looked at.”
Born in Toronto, Lewis was raised by her mother, who was Irish and French Canadian and ran a small landscaping business before her death in late 2022. Lewis’s father is from Jamaica and ran a reggae bar in Toronto. She taught herself to sew at age 8; at her studio, she pulled out one of her first shoulder bags, made from funky deconstructed bell bottoms and shoelaces.
Lewis remembers herself as a very quiet little girl who had a hard time communicating but learned to speak in a really loud voice through her art. Confident in her creativity but demoralized by the rigid structure of the classroom, she decided not to go to college and early on shared a studio space in Toronto with seven other women.
In 2017, for an exhibition at the city’s 8-11 Gallery, Lewis made her first soft sculpture, at a time when she was sleeping in her studio. The childlike figure rests in a small rocking chair, fleshed out with Lewis’s own clothes around an armature of electrical wire. The face, hands and feet were carved from plaster and studded with seashells for fingernails and toenails.
“This was when I really keyed into the idea of using what’s already around you,” Lewis said of the piece, “Untitled (play dumb to catch wise).” Clearly a self-portrait, which she has nicknamed Lil’ Gal, it sits in her studio today, cradling a host of dolls and gifts that friends bring over. It’s “the overseer of everything that I’ve ever made,” Lewis said. “She’s a good-luck charm.”
As part of her early self-education, Lewis said she would indiscriminately welcome people to her studio to talk about art. She was making busts with carved faces, mounted on pieces of steel rebar and cemented into concrete blocks, and ornamented with bits of fur, metal chains, stones, driftwood, wire and shells. The first artist that a visitor brought up as a point of comparison was Holley.
“I just got on my computer and read all about his story and upbringing, all about Gee’s Bend and all about yard art shows all over the South,” she said. Her eventual meeting with Holley at her Atlanta exhibition felt destined. “He has this really powerful third eye,” she said. In their continuing dialogue, the two artists recently exchanged cellphone photographs, which each would edit and manipulate and add something to, until they decided together it was done.
Lewis moved to New York in 2020 and remembers being shocked to get an Instagram message from the sculptor Simone Leigh, shortly after the announcement that Leigh would be representing the United States in the 2022 Venice Biennale. Leigh reposted an image of Lewis’s room-size head with giant tongue flopped on the floor, titled “Opus (the Ovule)” at Cooper Cole in Toronto, and asked for a studio visit.
“I thought the work was important enough that I sought her out,” Leigh said, comparing Lewis to Kara Walker, who was just 28 when she won a MacArthur “genius” award in 1997, for having “such a clear vision and maturity from the beginning.”
Lewis and Leigh have developed a close friendship and share Jamaican heritage. “We have in common an understanding of material culture that’s informed by the Caribbean,” Leigh said. She acquired a soft black leather figure by Lewis that has references to entities like duppy, a trickster ghost character that is part of Caribbean folklore. About eight feet long, it sits at half that height on Leigh’s bedroom floor.
“It’s one of my favorite sculptures,” said Leigh, who considers it a friendly figure even though some visitors to her home find it scary.
Cecilia Alemani, who curated the 59th international art exhibition for the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” included three colossal masks by Lewis in the show. Alemani said she was struck by how the public interacted with the works, which were hybrids of animals and more abstract figuration.
“Something about the scale of those pieces was incredibly moving and very engaging for viewers — there was almost this invitation to talk to them,” Alemani said. She sees Lewis as one of a number of younger artists pushing fiber art to a completely different level and not afraid of going big. “We’re at a point in which the distinction between art and craft doesn’t matter anymore,” she added.
Leigh admires how Lewis has also blurred hierarchies between art-school-trained and self-taught artists. “With Tau’s unusual pedigree, it makes it confusing for people because they associate a certain kind of conceptual strength with the academy, when really artists come from everywhere,” Leigh said.
The anchor of the Boston exhibition will be a huge galactic-looking quilt on the floor called “The Last Transmission,” with a kingdom of life-forms radiating in concentric circles out to 18 feet. Dozens of leather panels frame images like watchful eyes cobbled together from jewelry and chain links or sequences of aliens made with deconstructed shoe horns. Lewis’s five majestically robed figures, close to 12 feet tall, will gather around this tree of life that she thinks of as a kind of portal.
“It will be almost like you’re walking into a seance or some sort of spiritual ritual that’s playing out between the figures, in association with the landscape-oriented quilt,” said De Blois, the I.C.A. curator. He is drawn to the transformative power of Lewis’s repetitive labor and how she thinks about “the energy transfer of using found objects,” he said, placing her work in the art historical lineage of Betye Saar and David Hammons.
For Lewis, whose mother died in Canada with medical assistance, the exhibit is “all grief work,” she said. “After a monumental death, everything shifts.”
Too devastated to return immediately to making sculpture, Lewis coped by imposing order for the first time on her vast collection of salvaged materials. Now, in the locker in her studio, there are rows and rows of labeled bins, categorizing objects like animal bones found near her family’s home in Jamaica or in Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, plushies dropped by children on the subway and river rocks collected at Eugenia Falls in Canada.
She eventually brought the taxonomic approach of her locker to “The Last Transmission.” “I stopped romanticizing chaos,” said Lewis, who eased back into studio work by pulling objects from these bins to construct the floor quilt. “I can work in a way that’s systematized but still intuitive.”
All her new standing figures have both angelic and aquatic qualities, their robes cascading over steel frames with varying arm postures, such as praying hands or active speaker. “The Night Woman,” adorned in a black-and-purple mosaic of hand-dyed leather strips with an image of a manta ray gliding down its back, is named after a 2009 novel by the Jamaican writer Marlon James that Lewis found in her mother’s possessions.
The figure is “a portrait of night and everything dark and mysterious, and you can’t really tell if she’s benevolent or not,” Lewis said. Its glowing eyes are made with intricately painted rocks.
Lewis modeled another work, “The Miracle,” with sparkly and pastel remnants of sheer curtains, couch trim and upholstery, on the ethereal palette of immortal jellyfish. This species “resurrects itself out of its own DNA on the seabed,” she said, “a wonderful metaphor for the reinvention and reorganization after death.” “The Reaper,” cloaked in a fiery psychedelic palette, nods to the deep-sea anglerfish that hunts its prey with a bright lure.
All of her reflection on spirits and celestial and oceanic cosmologies during the making of the show has been reparative, Lewis said. She has continued her practice of incorporating bits and pieces from earlier bodies of work, including elements recycled from Lil’ Gal, into the new sculptures.
“It’s a way for me to have some sort of telepathic line to my work,” Lewis said. “The life cycle doesn’t end with the exhibition opening.”
Read More: How Tau Lewis Channels the Spirit World
