SFMOMA, Part 19: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Trident (Tau Lewis, 2022).
Thirteen feet tall, and it's a face. Not a portrait — a presence. Trident hangs on the wall like a mask the size of a building, built from steel, enamel, leather, shearling, shagreen, fur, suede, snakeskin, cotton twill, and nylon thread — every animal skin with its own grain and nap and smell, hand-stitched into lips and eyes from tensioned hide. Shaggy stacks of dark leather and fur alternate with taut stretches of suede. It is theatrical, deliberately so: the title reaches for Poseidon and his three-pronged spear, and for Obatala, the Yoruba orisha who sculpted human bodies from clay. A Greek sea god and a West African creator, holding up the same thirteen-foot face. Tau Lewis was twenty-eight when she made it. She is thirty-two now, with the CV of a mid-career titan and the hands of someone who taught herself to sew at eight.
The sculpture's masklike form references both the Greek sea god Poseidon and Obatala, the Yoruba deity who forged the physical form of human beings — "combining and expanding their cosmic, world-building realms," in SFMOMA's phrase. The materials were sourced from thrift shops, donations, and chance encounters — Salvation Army runs, a Long Island furrier's offcuts, remnants from strangers — and Lewis hand-stitches them together with shreds of her own precious personal effects: a school photo of her brother, her grandmother's hair beads, shells and bone from Negril, a piece of a Lonnie Holley sculpture, a little bear from the Bronx. She calls what this embeds in the work "material DNA." SFMOMA acquired Trident in 2023 — the first Lewis in the collection — through a gift of Michael D. Abrams, by exchange. It is new to the collection, on Floor 2, and it is the youngest artist's work in this entire series of articles by a generation.
Lewis is Jamaican-Canadian, born 1993 in Toronto, based in Brooklyn, self-taught — twice enrolled in school, twice dropped out, "a bad fit." Her father ran a reggae bar; her mother ran a landscaping business and died in 2022. The education came from peers and from studying Lonnie Holley and the Gee's Bend quilters. Simone Leigh told the New York Times that Lewis "blurs hierarchies between art-school-trained and self-taught artists": "people associate a certain kind of conceptual strength with the academy, when really artists come from everywhere." The Times also reported the detail that unlocks the whole practice: at eight years old she taught herself to sew, and she still keeps one of her first creations — a shoulder bag from deconstructed bell-bottoms and shoelaces — in her studio. The thirteen-foot mask and the bell-bottom bag are the same gesture, scaled up. The hand never changed. The ambition did.
Material DNA
"I consider them fossils containing the emotional generational DNA of the entire community." That's Lewis on her sculptures, and "fossils" is exactly right — these are things built from compressed time. Every scrap of leather was once a jacket, a couch, a life. The thrift-store sourcing isn't an aesthetic choice; it's an ethics. "So many of our cultural tools, especially against oppression, have to do with physical or situational upcycling — [whether] of a circumstance or an idea or an object." Black diasporic resourcefulness as spiritual technology: you make gods out of what the world discarded, because that's what your people have always done.
The "material DNA" is literal, not metaphorical. She sews fragments of her own life into the work — the hair beads, the shells, the brother's photo — so the sculpture carries her lineage the way a body carries genes. After her mother's death she organized her vast salvage collection into rows of labeled bins: animal bones from Negril and from Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, plushies dropped by children on the subway, river rocks from Canada. "I stopped romanticizing chaos," she said. The bins are the archive. The masks are what the archive becomes when it needs to speak.
And the labor is the message. Everything hand-stitched — she frames the sewing as healing "personal, collective and historical traumas through labour." This is the part the white-glove museum visitor needs to sit with: the thirteen-foot god was sewn by hand, stitch by stitch, by a woman in her twenties, out of thrift-store leather. The monumentality is handmade. The cosmic is domestic. The gallery text calls the form "theatrical, masklike," but the theater is in the service of something older than theater: the Yoruba masking traditions she cites, where masks are worn to conjure ancestors, made spiritually active by wearer and audience alike. One critic called her masks "anti-gifts" — covertly working to reverse the centuries-long journey of African masks looted for European collections. She makes the masks. The museum holds them. The direction of travel reverses.
The syncretism
The Poseidon-and-Obatala double reference is her signature move, and it's worth taking seriously as theology, not collage. Obatala is the eldest orisha, the divine sculptor, often described as having no fixed sex — the creator of human bodies, associated with white cloth and purity. Poseidon is the sea god with the trident. Lewis stages a world in which both cosmologies are true at once, and must be renegotiated: "the incapacity of humankind to create structures of law… without a reliance on the imaginary," in her own words. This isn't appropriation-collage. It's world-building — a post-apocalypse where European and African myths coexist and the viewer has to figure out the terms.
The mask tradition behind it: Lewis has said her masks were inspired by Yoruba masks "worn in ceremonies to conjure and communicate with ancestors and spiritual realms." The Trident face — lips and eyes from tensioned hide, shaggy fur as skin — is a conjuring device scaled to museum architecture. It doesn't represent a god. It is one, or it wants to be, the way a Yoruba mask is activated by wearing. The museum can't wear it. So it hangs there, thirteen feet tall, waiting.
So here's the thesis: Trident is a god built from garbage by a twenty-eight-year-old who taught herself to sew. Every element of that sentence is doing work. The god: Poseidon and Obatala, the sea and the sculptor, the trident and the clay. The garbage: thrift-store leather, furrier offcuts, the refuse of the luxury industry feeding sculptures about Black survival. The twenty-eight-year-old: self-taught, twice a dropout, Venice Biennale at twenty-eight, SFMOMA at twenty-nine. The sewing: by hand, stitch by stitch, the labor as healing, the bell-bottom bag grown into a thirteen-foot face. Lewis's great subject is what survives — what the community keeps, what the hand remembers, what the mask carries. Material DNA. The fossils speak. 🌁
Timeline — Tau Lewis
1993 — born October 31, Toronto; teaches herself to sew at eight
2016–2019 — Toronto artist-run spaces; MoMA PS1; New Museum; Hepworth Wakefield
2021 — Symphony, National Gallery of Canada rotunda
2022 — Divine Giants Tribunal, Venice Biennale; makes Trident; Vox Populi, Vox Dei, 52 Walker, New York
2023 — ICA Miami solo; SFMOMA acquires Trident, first in the collection
2024 — Spirit Level, ICA Boston; New York Times feature
2025 — David Zwirner, Los Angeles; Sadie Coles HQ, London