The Toronto-born artist Tau Lewis is only 29 but she’s already exhibited her totemic hand-sewn assemblages in Venice, at the 59th edition of the Biennale. Lewis grew up in Canada, but has roots in a small town in Western Jamaica—Negril—where her family has a home. Her art draws from both Canada and the Caribbean, an “upcycling of circumstance,” she calls it. Black artists have long made due with what was at hand, and Lewis uses salvaged materials to make her large sentient forms. She lives in Brooklyn now, and six works that double as sculptures of imagined ancestors are on view at 52 Walker. —Elena Clavarino