Last week, the artist Tanda Francis walked through a gallery door at the Met and stumbled into a world she helped bring to life. “Suddenly I saw the work I had poured so much thought into, now multiplied several times and dressed in stunning diverse looks… appearing like different people but with that very familiar face,” she recalled. “It was shocking, to the point where I had to look away just to pace or process what I was seeing.”
The sculptor and multimedia artist created the bespoke, distinctive mannequin heads for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” the Costume Institute’s spring 2025 exhibition. “I was so happy to see that this familiar face had developed to appear to take on so many new lives,” Francis added.
Tanda Francis working on the mannequin head for “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”
Photo: Anna Marie Kellen. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Francis’s contributions heighten “Superfine,” which runs from May 10 through October 26. Organized by guest curator Monica L. Miller in collaboration with Andrew Bolton and his team at the Costume Institute, it explores how Black communities across the Atlantic diaspora have wielded fashion—and especially suiting—as a tool of self-definition, resistance, and storytelling from the 18th century to today. The exhibition draws from Miller’s influential 2009 book and includes recent runway looks, historical garments, photographs, ephemera, and newly commissioned works that underscore the depth and range of Black sartorial expression.
Francis, a Brooklyn-based sculptor best known for her large-scale public artworks, doesn’t typically work within the realm of fashion. But the exhibition’s themes resonated with her. “My work is about Africanness in America,” she said. “For this kind of major event from the Met to speak to the diaspora is something that I thought was interesting.” Her art frequently addresses the visibility of diasporic African people in public space, using her practice to explore ancestry, spirituality, and cultural memory.
Tanda Francis, RockIt Black (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
Francis’s outdoor works are often monumental African heads—regal sculptures that command space and attention. “Culturally speaking, [the head] is the important part of the body—the being, the spiritual house of the human.” In her view, “the body becomes secondary… something to hold the head.” She was a natural choice to scale down and replicate that focus in multiples for the Met’s exhibition. She based her mannequin on a historical figure, choosing a face whose story carried layered political meaning: André Matsoua.
Matsoua was a Congolese political thinker and founder of a movement that challenged French rule in the early 20th century. He is widely regarded as the original and embodied militant Black dandyism. Sapeur is a term rooted in La Sape—a French abbreviation of the Society of Ambiance-Makers and Elegant People. The Congolese movement celebrates men who express identity and resistance through flamboyant, impeccably styled European fashion. “He was very active politically and, in the community, to fight colonialism, and that was his way—by wearing the clothes of the colonizers,” Francis said. “That idea is just so interesting to me, you are wearing the clothes of the people who are controlling you. How do you do that and take control?”
Ensemble by LaQuan Smith, spring/summer 2025. Courtesy LaQuan Smith. Photo © Tyler Mitchell 2025
Aesthetically, Matsoua’s complex profile lends a nuanced, timeless narrative weight to the contemporary looks he wears in the exhibition. Though he appears only in modern ensembles, his face grounds them with a sense of history—whether styled in a Black Panther–inspired Telfar leather trench and bellbottoms from 2024, or in sharply tailored Louis Vuitton suits designed by both Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams.
To begin, Francis sculpted a wax maquette of the head, meticulously shaping it. At the time, she was enmeshed in a flurry of site visits for potential projects. “I knew I had to travel back and forth,” she said. “It’s something that I could put in my backpack and go.” The wax model was eventually scanned and refined digitally, allowing Francis to manipulate the form in a 3D environment. “In between the fiberglass and resin and the wax, it became a fully digital experience,” she explained. “I scanned the wax and worked with it in 3D—moving it around and envisioning how the piece, and the meaning behind it, could present itself.”
Suit by Ev Bravado and Téla D’Amore for Who Decides War, fall/winter 2024–25.
Courtesy Who Decides War. Photo © Tyler Mitchell 2025
The experience has shifted Francis’s practice in lasting ways. “I’m doing more digital work now,” she said. “It’s been kind of beautiful. When I started this piece, A.I. hadn’t yet made its presence fully felt, and now it’s everywhere. So much has changed in just a few months. It’s made me want to explore the digital space more—while still keeping one foot in the analog. I like mixing the two, and I think that’s going to be more visible in my work moving forward.”
Though unaccustomed to working within the fashion sphere, Francis came to appreciate its immediacy and power as a medium. “This topic is heavy. It’s about race in America. It’s about Blackness in America,” she said. “And that’s something that’s been made very heavy, because historically, we haven’t dealt with it the way we should. It’s become this thing we have to keep lifting. And the interesting part is, we’re dealing with it here through fashion.” In Superfine her work adds another layer to a complex conversation.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
