Interrogating Systems: A Conversation with Tavares Strachan

MacArthur recipient Tavares Strachan describes himself as an explorer and storyteller. As an artist, he has developed a unique practice that blends art, science, music, and cultural inquiry. His range of inquiry is as large as the knowledge systems that have fascinated him since he was a child—themes of visibility, inclusion, space travel, and the cosmos—and his expansive, ambitious projects have encompassed the Bahamas, the North Pole, Russia, and Venice.

At the heart of Strachan’s work, and his current survey exhibition “The Day Tomorrow Began,” is Encyclopedia of Invisibility, an evolving compendium of “hidden” histories, which he has compiled into an open-ended archive of underground knowledge suppressed by canonizing historical narratives. The Encyclopedia has inspired many of Strachan’s recent projects, including monumental sculptures, works in glass and ceramic, paintings, tapestries, self-playing musical instruments, and room-scale installations, which “The Day Tomorrow Began” weaves into an immersive, multisensory experience.

Jan Garden Castro: Your 2025 exhibition “Supernova” at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany explored confluences of science, art, and the environment. Could you walk us through your favorite piece?
Tavares Strachan: There are many, but one that stands out is Six Thousand Years (2018), installed in the entranceway. It’s an immersive room lined with encyclopedia pages that I’ve drawn, printed, and painted over. The pages surround the encyclopedia itself, a book/sculpture in the center of the room.

JGC: Who organized the poly/vocal programs that accompanied the exhibition?
TS: I collaborate with a range of musicians; for this project, I worked with a Jamaican artist who performs under the stage name Runkus.

JGC: As a storyteller and a MacArthur awardee with a large platform, what is your most important story to tell today, and who is your audience?
TS: My audience is my own childhood self. If we’re honest about it, if we can’t serve ourselves, then who can we serve? The most important story to tell is about that relationship between any maker and their childhood self.

JGC: I read something about your Rastafarian background and the I-double-I connection, which plays a large role in your work. Could you explain what that is?
TS: I grew up around a lot of Rastas, such as Jah Rastafari. His majesty Haile Selasie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, who was a descendent of King David, is an important central figure. Rasta means “head,” and the idea is that the I represents the Rastafari that’s in you, so there’s an I in I. That’s the working concept. Trying to describe this is like trying to describe the holy trinity in Christianity—the father, the son, and the holy spirit—one in three and three in one. It’s mesmerizing to try to articulate with words—I can’t explain it in a way that’s more accessible; that’s the nature of religious concepts.

JGC: The Encyclopedia of Invisibility is an ongoing project that involves many forms of storytelling. It now has more than 150,000 entries. When did it begin, and what are some of its latest iterations?
TS: The research started way before putting together the actual encyclopedia. It really started when I was a youth inspired by knowledge systems. I love systems, I love thinking about systems, I love interrogating systems and contemplating them. In terms of focused work on the Encyclopedia, it began in earnest about 15 years ago.

JGC: Who compiles the encyclopedia?
TS: Me and the team here at the studio.

JGC: What is the theme of your survey exhibition “The Day Tomorrow Began,” which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and is now on view at the Columbus Museum of Art?
TS: The show has to do with various themes that I’ve worked with previously: belonging, the things human beings have in common regardless of their background or where they’re from, and visibility/invisibility.

JGC: Your Mannheim exhibition seemed to focus on space travel, historically and metaphorically. Why are these two directions important?
TS: I’ve always loved travel. I love the idea of systems of travel, systems of limitation. Metaphorical and metaphysical exploration are as important as physical exploration.

JGC: Are there astrological, historical, and spiritual connections between space and invisibility?
TS: Yes, artists are always making interconnections.

JGC: “Starless Midnight,” your exhibition at Marian Goodman’s New York gallery last year, also highlighted your multivalent approach. Entering the show, viewers encountered half of a self-playing black piano—Split Consciousness (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor) (2025)—and a book in a Lucite vitrine—Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Pocket Guide) (2024). The other piano half played in the next gallery. In what ways do darkness and split consciousness and double consciousness connect to your invisibility themes?
TS: Double consciousness is a phrase coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in his book The Souls of Black Folk. He was talking about the tension or the reality of living with two co-existing realities. One is inherently of you and the other is inherently of the world you inhabit. It denotes most of the things I do; it’s part of navigating the world that we live in.

JGC: To me, the central gallery containing a spiritual figure surrounded by fragrant sweet grass and a clay/earthen floor seemed like a salute to your native Bahamas and an expansive Indigenous spiritual experience.
TS: Exuma is the main character, whose stage name was the Obeah Man, known professionally as Tony McKay (1942–97), a shaman from Cat Island, which is a crucial island, a place of deep cultural significance in the Bahamas. His presence in sculptural form translates his spiritual energy. I encourage you to listen to his music when you have a chance.

JGC: I loved the quotation from James Baldwin—“You could be that person…”— rendered in colored neon around the top of three walls. Was this room your message to viewers about loving and acknowledging all humans, not just those whom we know?
TS: I think so. One of the greatest uses of the imagination is to be able to put oneself into someone else’s shoes.

JGC: Music was an important part of the exhibition. The self-playing instruments included two keyboards, a handmade drum, a kora, and a balafon.
TS: The opening piece is a score I wrote in concert with my team, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The other compositions are attributed to various musicians, including Clyde Stubblefield, a great drummer. Another is dedicated to Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a great musician known as the mother of rock and roll. There’s also a piece inspired by Blind Tom Wiggins, a legendary pianist at the turn of the century who went on to become a virtuoso.

JGC: I love the title “Starless Midnight.” You didn’t explain that the phrase comes from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Nobel speech saying, “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality…” What do the two words of the title mean to you?
TS: I fell in love with the poetry and beauty of that phrase. It carries many layers of meaning.

JGC: It suggests the darkest darkness you can have.
TS: Which I think is the most beautiful darkness.

JGC: It doesn’t necessarily allude to war and racism?
TS: If you listen to an astronaut talk about the color of space when they first enter it, they describe a very beautiful dark.

JGC: You trained as an astronaut in Star City, Russia. How did you get involved?
TS: I trained as an astronaut in 2007–08 and went through all of the phases of training in Russian. I had a translator and a producer.

JGC: Did you intend to go into space?
TS: The training itself is almost like being in space; it’s a simulation of the environment in space, so I loved that.

JGC: What are some your inspirations from the Bahamas?
TS: Everything’s an inspiration from the Bahamas. For all of us, I think, our source is home; home is the core of what we do. For me, if you extract home, there’s a certain level of void or emptiness that goes along with it.

JGC: Could you talk about the juxtapositions in your mixed-media collages such as Jupiter’s Fist (Haile Selassie) (2025)?
TS: The beauty of picture-making is that there’s a point at which the job of the artist ends and the job of the audience begins. I love that moment. I would not dare take it away from the audience by trying to describe any of it.

JGC: Along those lines, “Starless Midnight” was initially shown with no signage or labels, and later an exhibition checklist was created. Do you feel such information overload prevents a viewer’s sensory experience?
TS: I’m somewhere in the middle on that. There’s a school of thought around the didactic approach, where certain works may require some anchoring or context, while others may not. Everyone’s coming at it from a different set of perspectives and viewpoints, so it’s hard to determine what makes sense universally.

JGC: Your work often involves more than one medium, and the materials can include neon, marble, hair, ceramics, thatch, fiber, pigment, leather, and more.
TS: Human beings speak many languages, right? To me, that’s a critical piece to all of it. When you want to speak to people, you speak in all those languages.

JGC: Often, in works like Shu and Horus (Coleman and Harriet) (2025), you layer Black history figures inside Fang and other African masks. How are these choices made? Is there a literal connection between the subject and the Indigenous group?
TS: I take a lot of artistic licenses—relationships that I find compelling or funky or interesting to me.

JGC: You’ve had three major catalogues published in recent years: SEEN/UNSEEN, from your 2013 New York exhibition at an undisclosed location; In Plain Sight, from your 2020 London Marian Goodman exhibition; and There is Light Somewhere, from your 2024 Hayward Gallery exhibition. Is each book a springboard toward exploring interdisciplinary learning? Why is this outside-the-box thinking important?
TS: Those are collections of things I’ve done over the past years. I don’t know if I consider them outside-the-box thinking. I am learning a certain appreciation for systems. The observation of systems is crucial to the human story and how we’ve survived to this point. I also think that, at the same time, a kind of irreverence for these systems allows us to evolve. I love thinking about systems.

JGC: So many systems are being erased and destroyed today.
TS: That’s a part of it. A part of the position, sometimes, of being a human being is to wrestle with your own belonging. You negotiate your own belonging, and a part of that is resistance, in a way. Whatever side of the aisle you might be on, we get to negotiate our own belonging.

JGC: What are some programs you do with children? You took 40 fourth and fifth graders to the Venice Biennale in 2013 and staged Polar Eclipse.
TS: That’s a good one. The children had never left the islands before; they learned a new Inupiaq song (an Inuit Arctic dying language) and performed it brilliantly at the Biennale’s Bahamas pavilion. They wore their school uniforms.

JC: Do you do other projects with children in the Bahamas? Are they making rocket ships?
TS: Yeah, but those are all top secret.

JGC: How did you dream up your 2006 ice project The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Arctic Ice Project)? You did this as a grad student at Yale.
TS: I was thinking about monuments and ice and exploration, and that’s kind of how it all evolved.

JGC: Did you go to the Arctic more than once? What were the logistics of figuring out the science, the politics, and the financing for transporting tons of ice from the Arctic to the Bahamas?
TS: The North Pole the second time—the super High Arctic in 2013. There was more science than politics and more logistics than science. It was, again, about understanding systems—the geological systems of how ice is formed, and the systems of transportation and moving large objects across the world, and the conceptual art systems of storytelling were all essential to that work.

JGC: Did you invent the solar-powered cooling system using ice?
TS: “Invent” might be overly generous, but the team I worked with put that together.

JGC: Is anyone using solar ice cooling now?
TS: I think so. I hope so. I see solar-powered ice systems all around the world now.

JGC: Any advice for sculptors, artists, and scientists today?
TS: Be honest with yourself.

Tavares Strachan’s survey exhibition “The Day Tomorrow Began” is on view at the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio, through January 3, 2027. Bar Room (2022/2025), a fully operational rum bar, café, and community gathering place, will remain open as a permanent installation.