Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

ICA Miami awards the fourth Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture to Tau Lewis. Working in an array of techniques—including hand-sewing, appliqué, carving, and assemblage—Lewis honors the materials and creative modalities intrinsic to communities of the African diaspora.

Using found, inherited, and secondhand cloth and objects, Lewis contemplates the affective histories of her materials. Disparate stories and voices are salvaged from the fibers during these processes of transformation; en masse, they imbue Lewis’s forms with potency and life.

The artist’s new sculpture The cure will be completed in my body, silence your spirit to let me reach you, my skin will secrete angels and you will have forgotten and forgiven all. (2023) evokes a mythic world of her own creation. Lewis creates in iterations, conceiving of her bodies of work similarly to chapters spread across different volumes. The newest exploration of Lewis’s Saint Mozelle—which she describes as a tutelary deity—forms the center of the installation and spills over with transmuting blossoms and other small life forms. The materials, including found jewelry, leather scraps, drum skins, teeth, and other talismans, carry unique attributes and mysteries beyond what the eye can see—much like the spirit of Mozelle itself.

Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto) has had recent solo exhibitions at 52 Walker, New York, (2022); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2021); and Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2020). Her work has been prominently featured in prestigious exhibitions including the Venice Biennale: “The Milk of Dreams” (2022). Lewis’s work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library Collection, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; among many others. Lewis lives and works in Brooklyn.

Inaugurated in 2019, the Ezratti Family Prize for Sculpture is awarded by ICA Miami to a living artist in recognition of their exceptional contributions in sculpture and supports the creation of a new commission. Building on the museum’s history of commissioning and presenting new works, the prize reflects ICA Miami’s ongoing commitment to promoting experimentation in artistic practice and providing an international platform for influential voices in contemporary art. Earlier recipients of the Ezratti Prize for Sculpture are Chakaia Booker, Damián Ortega, and Robert Grosvenor.

The exhibition is organized by ICA Miami and curated by Stephanie Seidel, Curator.