TAVARES STRACHAN

Strachan has received numerous awards and residencies, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2022) and an Artist in Residence position at the Getty Research Institute (2019–20). In 2025, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Columbus Museum of Art co-organised Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, which opened at LACMA as the artist’s first museum survey exhibition in the United States and will be on view at the Columbus Museum of Art from 16 May 2026 to 3 January 2027.

Early life and Education

Tavares Henderson Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau and has described how growing up in the Bain Town neighbourhood shaped his view of the world. He studied painting and liberal arts at the College of The Bahamas and later at Brown University before focusing on sculpture and glass.

Strachan completed a BFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University in 2006, marking a shift from traditional painting to conceptually driven, materially experimental work. He now divides his time between studios in New York and Nassau, where he has established long-term community, educational, and research initiatives.

Practice, Themes, and Key Projects

Strachan’s artistic practice activates the intersections of art, science, and politics, offering a uniquely synthesised view on how scientific knowledge and historical narratives are constructed. Aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, medicine, and extreme climatology serve as arenas for monumental allegories that address cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation. Themes of invisibility, endurance, and loss are central, as he re-inscribes overlooked figures—particularly Black scientists, explorers, and cultural leaders—into public consciousness.

His practice spans neon text works, glass and bronze sculptures, large-scale installations, and collaborative projects that operate at the scale of expeditions and aerospace programmes. Signature works include The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (2006), for which he transported a 2.5-ton block of Arctic ice to his childhood school in Nassau in a solar-powered freezer, invoking climate fragility, cultural displacement, and the overlooked legacy of Arctic explorer Matthew Henson.

Initiated in 2004, the multi-year project Orthostatic Tolerance documented Strachan’s cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, and related space-travel experiments in Nassau conducted under his Bahamas Air and Sea Exploration Center (BASEC). Works such as Invisible Diver (2010)—a hand-blown glass circulatory system submerged in mineral oil and visible only from certain angles—link scientific experiment with poetics of disappearance, making bodies and histories appear and vanish in the same gesture.

Strachan’s long-term project Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018) takes the form of a more-than-2,000-page encyclopaedia dedicated to people, places, and ideas rendered invisible in mainstream histories. In his 2023 TED Talk on the work, he discusses this project as a framework for restoring lost narratives and as a conceptual engine for many of his sculptures and installations. He argues that “lost stories” — people, places and events omitted from dominant histories — shape who is seen as important, and that we have a responsibility to excavate and amplify them at a scale that matches their significance.

In 2011 he realised Seen/Unseen, a large survey of over 50 works installed in an undisclosed New York warehouse and closed to the public, turning the exhibition itself into a meditation on presence, absence, and access. His satellite project ENOCH (2018), created with LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, launched a 3U CubeSat into orbit to honour Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American selected for a national space programme, keeping the commemorative sculpture in sun-synchronous orbit until 2021.

Recent work such as The First Supper (Galaxy Black) (2021–23), unveiled at London‘s Royal Academy of Arts in 2024, reimagines Leonardo’s Last Supper with Black historical and cultural figures in cast bronze, overlayed with black patina and gold leaf, to propose an alternative canon of saints, prophets, and visionaries.

Research Platforms and Community Initiatives

Strachan has established the Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center (B.A.S.E.C.) in Nassau, a combined art studio and scientific research platform that uses aerospace and marine exploration as a framework for education, community building, and world-making. B.A.S.E.C. and its related programmes engage scientists, engineers, artists, and young people, turning the artist’s practice into a hybrid research station that blurs distinctions between experiment, pedagogy, and artwork.

He is also the founder of OKU, a not-for-profit community project in Nassau that includes an artist residency, exhibition spaces, scholarship scheme, and after-school creative programmes. These initiatives reflect his commitment to building local infrastructures for art and science while connecting The Bahamas to global conversations about technology, climate, and Black futures.

Major Exhibitions and Recent Projects

Strachan has presented solo and collaborative projects at institutions including the Venice Biennale, Prospect New Orleans, the Lyon Biennale, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Carnegie International, the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery, SFMOMA, ICA Philadelphia, and the Getty Research Institute, among others. He is represented internationally by Marian Goodman Gallery and Perrotin.

Major solo exhibitions include:

• 2026-2027– Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, USA.
• 2025–2026 – Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA.
• 2024 – Tavares Strachan: There Is Light Somewhere, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London, UK.
• 2024 – Magnificent Darkness, Marian Goodman Gallery, Los Angeles, USA.
• 2013 – Polar Eclipse, Bahamas Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy.
• 2011 – Seen/Unseen, undisclosed exhibition space, New York, USA.
• 2011 – Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA.
• 2010 – Orthostatic Tolerance: Launching into an Infinite Distance, Grand Arts, Kansas City, USA.

Tavares Strachan’s survey exhibition The Day Tomorrow Began, initially on view at LACMA and on view at the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti from 16 May 2026 to 3 January 2027, brings together nearly a decade of the artist’s work across sculpture, painting, neon text, music, and immersive environments. Anchored by Strachan’s expansive project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), a 2,000-page reference work devoted to marginalised people, places, and ideas, the exhibition situates his large-scale Flip Monuments, ceramic works exploring the iconography of Black haircare, and self-playing instruments within a speculative archive that collapses boundaries between art, science, history, and everyday life. In Columbus, this inquiry extends into the museum’s architecture itself, where the twenty-foot Flip Monument (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025) and the participatory installation Bar Room (2022/2025)—a functioning rum bar and café that will remain on permanent view—underscore Strachan’s commitment to reimagining public monuments and cultural institutions as active, living sites of visibility and belonging.

Awards and Honours

Strachan received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022, recognising his expansion of what contemporary art can be and his efforts to foreground overlooked contributors across science, politics, and culture. He was awarded the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Artist Grant in 2014, supporting the development of ENOCH.

Other distinctions include the Frontier Art Prize (2018), the inaugural Artist-in-Residence position at the Allen Institute (2018), an Artist-in-Residence Scholar appointment at the Getty Research Institute (2019–20), a Tiffany Foundation Grant (2008), the Grand Arts Residency Fellowship (2007), and the Alice B. Kimball Fellowship (2006), among others. These honours underscore the breadth of his influence at the intersection of art, science, and social history.

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Ocula | 2026