Tavares Strachan

Tavares Strachan’s conceptual, interdisciplinary practice activates connections between art, history, science, and cultural critique to mobilize our senses, intellect and curiosity, asking us to reconsider our received knowledge of the world. Growing up in the Bahamas, Strachan spent his youth looking into the night sky, which would fuel his obsession with space and exploration. Themes of invisibility, displacement, and loss are central to his work, which questions historically canonized narratives that marginalize or obscure others. He uses the rubric of received knowledge to make networks and structures of power more visible, and to bring to light forgotten or little-known historical epics and human achievements. Aeronautical exploration, expeditions to desolate locations and extreme environments, and allegories of the human aspiration to surmount mortal limitations and adverse circumstances, are some of his settings for telling lost stories and stories of the invisible. In the early 2010s he began the Encyclopedia of Invisibility, an A-to-Z compendium of now 17,000 entries describing legacies of the under-recognized and unfamiliar—people, places, events, objects, concepts, and phenomena—based on the layout and logic of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Tracing the story of polar explorer Matthew Henson, thought to be the first person to reach the North Pole, Strachan undertook expeditions to the Arctic and excavated a 4.5-ton block of ice that he then shipped by Federal Express to his elementary school in Nassau where it was exhibited in a specially designed solar-powered freezer chamber. He has collaborated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists, trained as a cosmonaut, and launched an artwork into space in collaboration with SpaceX in tribute to Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., the first African American astronaut selected for any United States national space program. Extensively researched, his projects are, oftentimes, monumental in scale and scope, and realized in collaboration with specialists and organizations across a wide spectrum of fields. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between his studio in New York and Nassau in the Bahamas, where he has established art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) and OKU, a not-for-profit community project encompassing an artist residency and exhibition spaces, a scholarship scheme, and after-school creative programs.