Ghanaian artist El Anatsui’s Earth Skin as inspiration for dress worn to Met Gala by Suleika Jouaud, wife of Jon Baptiste

One of the stops on our (my daughter Karen and me) recent transcontinental train journey was the city of Denver and, while there, we visited the Arts of Africa collection in the city’s Art Museum. The collection had some interesting pieces and I fell behind Karen as we traversed it. At some point I heard Karen engaged in conversation  with two other voices. When I caught up with her I found her in deep conversation with two museum employees and she took me aside to show me the artwork that they had been discussing. The piece was beautiful — shimmery, textural, colorful and with impressive folds. 

Karen viewing El Anatsui’s Rain has no Father (2008)
at the Denver Art Museum on May 17, 2026.

From a distance it appeared to be made from a fabric of some type but, as I got closer, I could see the discontinuities between the individual pieces. The material, Karen said, was bottle tops tied together into a sheet-like structure. Not only was it attractive, she said, but, according to the staffers, the wife of Jon Batiste (the Grammy-award-winning musician) had worn a dress inspired by the artist’s design to the most recent  Met Gala.

I was intrigued. I was totally unfamiliar with the artist and, similarly so, with Jon Batiste’s wife. Further, I had not seen the particular piece in the few pictures I had seen coming out of the Met GalaSome investigation  was in order.

The Met Gala
The theme for the Met Gala Spring 2026 exhibition was  Costume as Art. The magazine Marie Claire identified some outfits worn that evening as resembling or drawing inspiration from iconic art works.  Among these, according to the magazine, was Suleika Jaouad in Christian Soriano inspired by Earth’s Skin by El Anatsui.

Left — Suleika Jaouad in Soriano, Right — Earth’s
 Skin (detail) by El Anatsui (Source:Marie Claire)

El Anatsui, Earth’s Skin

Who is Suleika Jaouad?
Suleika is described as a “writer, advocate and international speaker” who had developed Leukemia by the age of 22 and “documented her odyssey of illness, healing, and self-discovery in the New York Times Best Seller Between Two Kingdoms.” A fuller description of Suleika and her accomplishments can be found on her self-titled website. 

Who is El Anatsui?

The colossal, tactile artworks of contemporary Ghanaian artist El Anatsui have a ghostly, liminal quality that is impossible to pin down, hovering somewhere between sculpture, woven textile, and installation. Made from salvaged scraps of plastic, wood, and, most recently shiny metal, his suspended structures perform the challenging trick of turning discarded scraps into treasure; whether rippling against a flat wall or hung mid-air, the glittering, sensitively rendered surfaces he creates are great teeming masses of energy and life, filling the spaces they occupy with a commanding physical presence, while speaking of quiet, abstract narratives related to his African heritage and its place in the world today (blog.fabricstore.com).

El Anatsui was born and grew up in Ghana. He studied sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University and gained a teaching appointment at the Sculpture Department at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. Given the paucity of sculptural source material in the area of the University, El Anatsui encouraged his students to look at their own surroundings for subject matter. He practiced what he preached focusing his practices in African themes and traditions.

Some of his earliest found-object works were from driftwood found on a beach in Denmark while he was doing a residency there. He subsequently created works using milk-bottle lids, cassava graters and foil bottle tops. He discovered that cutting the bottle tops up and binding them together with copper wire gave him source material that was pliable and portable and allowed flexibility in the creation of finished pieces. Sculptures made from the material had a “densely layered and richly tactile hand-made quality.

El Anatsui’s works can be found amongst some of the most prestigious art collections in the world including permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC; The British Museum; the Vatican Museum and many more. In 2023 he was awarded the highly reputable Hyundai Commission by Tate Modern (elanatsui.com).

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In re the Met Gala, Marie stated thusly: “The outfits that shone brightest, however, were those that felt loosely spectacular — bold silhouettes, creative craftsmanship and looks that could genuinely be counted as costume.”