Fashion
How Tau Lewis Channels the Spirit World
Her first solo museum exhibition, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, is full of towering, mysterious beings. The exhibit is “all grief work,” she said.
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.
