All people remarks on how clear the Bahamian waters are—azure blue, crystalline and teeming with life. The edgless readability of the Bahamian sky, un-crowded by the blare of sunshine air pollution, will get much less consideration. The artist Tavares Strachan grew up in Naussau along with his head cocked star-wards, watching the glow of constellations twinkle and shift in infinite dimensions. It’s little marvel, then, that he has by no means paid a lot consideration to limitations. Since he arrived on the artwork scene after graduating from Yale College’s MFA programme in 2006, his observe has spanned numerous supplies, genres, themes and storytelling schema, spanning ideas as numerous as house journey and Black haircare.
His new solo exhibition on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork (Lacma), The Day Tomorrow Started (till 29 March 2026), leads viewers by means of a maze of multi-sensory installations, combining neon, ceramics, bronze, portray, textual content and efficiency parts in service of immersive, kaleidoscopic world-building. Co-organised with the Columbus Museum of Artwork in Ohio, The Day Tomorrow Started options 20 new works that excavate invisible histories, the kind of tales that don’t match neatly inside white supremacy’s narrative of the previous. (In Columbus, a brand new everlasting set up by Strachan is being unveiled 24 October within the type of a participatory speakeasy referred to as Bar Room; The Day Tomorrow Started opens subsequent Could.)
In a geopolitical context marked by censorship and surveillance, The Day Tomorrow Started seems like a deep, recalibrating exhale by an artist daring to dream of a much less encumbered, extra equitable future.
Strachan has positioned himself as an artist-explorer all through his profession, coaching as a cosmonaut, collaborating with Massachusetts Institute of Know-how scientists and bodily tracing the steps of the primary individual to achieve the North Pole, a Black man named Matthew Henson. His theoretical collapse of the pre-Fashionable expedition ethos along with his personal artistic course of is on full show in Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), a signature enterprise that’s spotlighted within the exhibition. The artist’s spin on the Encyclopedia Britannica spans greater than 2,000 pages, relaying details about folks, locations and concepts that Strachan has deemed “invisible” to the mainstream.
A brand new assortment of bronze sculptures, concurrently stately and surreal, interrogate the fraught position of public monuments in setting up nationalist reminiscence, calling upon folklore imagery and figures from the Haitian Revolution to formulate a post-colonial visible language. There’s additionally a hypnotic neon piece each lionising and contrasting the phrases of two heavyweight American males of letters: James Baldwin and Mark Twain. Expansive and numerous as his chosen media could also be, Strachan’s major inventive throughline is a restrained, high-finish class, a straight-backed type of consideration that imbues extra natural parts of his tableaus with hard-won gravitas. Strachan could eschew limits, however by no means requirements—his ceramics are impossibly easy, his hand-rendered annotations cautious and exact.
Strachan, who splits his time between Nassau and New York, has proven his work at Prospect New Orleans, the Biennale Lyon and the MIT Listing Visible Arts Heart. He represented the Bahamas on the fifty fifth Venice Biennale, and is a MacArthur Basis fellowship recipient, in addition to the winner of a Lacma Artwork + Know-how Lab Artist Grant. In Nassau, he has established an artwork studio and scientific analysis platform, the Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Heart, in addition to Oku, a non-profit that features an artist residency, exhibition areas, a scholarship scheme and an after-school artistic programme.
The Artwork Newspaper caught up with Strachan to speak about titles, course of, and politics.
Tavares Strachan, Inside Elder (Nina Simone as Queen of Sheba), 2023 Courtesy the artist. Photograph by Jonty Wilde
The Artwork Newspaper: The place did you get your inspiration for the title of the exhibition, The Day Tomorrow Started?
Tavares Strachan: We have grown accustomed to titles not being as vital as a minimum of I believe they need to be! This title may be very significant to me as a result of it is in regards to the fragility of that single second between someday and the following, what the physique does and what the thoughts does with the uncertainty that comes with that one second after we do not know what is going on to occur the following day. On this second with such intense anxiousness about every part occurring on the planet, I assumed it was applicable to concentrate on the potential hope in that one second between someday and the following.
Might you discuss your fascination with Henri Christophe and the Haitian Revolution, and the way it reverberates within the present political second?
There are a few threads there. The primary one is that I found the story of Henry Christophe within the Haitian Revolution. Clearly, I used to be born within the Bahamas. My greatest buddy is known as after Henri Christophe and is expounded to him. We had been simply hanging out someday as youngsters, and he mentioned, “Oh, my title’s after this man.” And I used to be like, “Oh, OK. Attention-grabbing.” However there was no point out of Christophe in any locations of upper studying, any college. So I believe that is the primary thread.
The second is that it is spectacular how one thing so integral to the Western world, to this area, on this hemisphere a minimum of, is so unseen. It’s not part of the storytelling traditions within the West, as a result of this revolution occurred earlier than America existed.
The third thread is, particularly to this work, that one of many ironies of the story of the revolution is that Christophe named himself King, which in some methods is a really problematic place to soak up relation to the causes that he was preventing for. All these layers are what the work is about.
How does this work grapple with censorship whereas additionally investing within the notion of hope?
For me, it’s not a query of “now”, it is extra a query of “all the time”. The attention-grabbing factor in regards to the present second is that it is a very attention-grabbing window into process, proper? The procedures of regimes which have prior to now used methods which can be much like what we’re seeing now. Having this work exist inside this second is an efficient measuring keep on with that second, to these moments of protest on the street.
Is there a sure methodology you employ to translate particular concepts into particular media?
It is about world-making. The thought of making logic for an viewers to expertise bodily in a second when every part’s so mediated is the grounding aspect, proper? So odor is essential. Sound is extremely vital. Pacing is vital. Tempo is extremely vital. Making rooms you could stroll by means of shortly versus ones that it’s important to decelerate. Making rooms which can be extremely shiny, ones which can be extremely darkish. The intention is to unpack a stage of human emotion and presence that’s actually vital for me to transmit to the viewers. I see myself as an viewers for this work additionally. And numerous that want to offer an viewers an expertise that may unlock some kind of emotional potential is what’s driving a few of the materials decisions.
I do know you’ve got a background in glass out of your undergraduate research on the Rhode Island Faculty of Design. What about neon felt like a superb match for a bit about James Baldwin and Mark Twain, two giants of language?
You understand, there’s one thing magical about trapping gasoline and electrifying it and letting it gentle up. That is smart when it comes to the context of those two poets who’re actually humanists, they usually’re actually mining this place of searching for how we’re the identical versus how we’re totally different, which I believe is what a lot of the exhibition’s about. I could not consider a greater materials apart from glass and neon to inform a narrative.
Tavares Strachan, Six Thousand Years, 2018 Courtesy Tavares Strachan and the San Francisco Museum of Artwork, picture by Frazer Bradshaw
Talking of humanism, what’s your humanist curiosity in house exploration as an artist?
I used to be a child who was all the time fascinated by exploration, engaged on boats as a toddler rising up. And I spent numerous nights on the ocean mapping the celebrities. There is a richness of bodily and metaphysical metaphors that associate with house—the historical past of people and the historical past of human journey and the historical past of storytelling. House additionally feeds into this frontier concept and there’s a layer of storytelling when you concentrate on the historical past of human beings, historical past of exploration and all of the challenges and the issues that associate with it. You understand, the emotions of exhilaration and journey.
Talking of Enlightenment-era logic, I’ve received to know the way you made this encyclopaedia. How lengthy have you ever been engaged on it?
It began with my encounter with the story of Matthew Henson. Clearly, he is the pioneer who found the North Pole. The misdirection second is the truth that he is a Black man who is that this Arctic explorer, which for lots of people appears to be uncommon, however for him was fairly normal. That story pressured me to consider all the opposite tales which will sit within the pocket of Matthew Henson’s story. Once I began doing all this analysis, it was simply me alone for the primary 12 months, after which two years later, I had one assistant after which two, after which 18 years later, we produced the e book. There’s 17,000 entries in complete.
Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Started, till 29 March 2026, Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork
