Tavares Strachan

Kindly donated by Celeste and Anthony Meier

A Children’s History of Invisibility is composed of 26 block letters with illustrations overlaid on top of encyclopedic entries and collage. Each individual letter is densely “worked” with imagery referenced in the encyclopedia entry authored by the artist. As a child in the Bahamas, Strachan spent hours poring over Encyclopedia Britannica – one of limited available resources to access the outside world. These studies stuck with him throughout his career and he has spent the last 10 years rewriting entries in the Encyclopedia to highlight the omitted, forgotten or otherwise invisible history of the world. A Children’s History of Invisibility presents these modified entries in illustrated, alphabetical form.  

Tavares Strachan’s artistic practice activates the intersections of art, science, and politics, offering uniquely synthesized points of view on the cultural dynamics of scientific knowledge. Aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology are but some of the thematic arenas out of which Strachan creates monumental allegories that tell of cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation. His text-based neon sculptures are an anthem for our political and cultural moment, and his lexicon an effort to mobilize community and societal change. Strachan’s ambitious, open-ended practice has included collaborations with numerous organizations and institutions across the disciplines.

Strachan was born in 1979 in Nassau, Bahamas, and currently lives and works between New York City and Nassau. He received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006.

Strachan’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions including You Belong Here, Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans; The Immeasurable Daydream, Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; Polar Eclipse, The Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale, Venice; Seen/Unseen, Undisclosed Exhibition, New York; Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; among others. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2019-2020); Frontier Art Prize (2018), and the Allen Institute’s inaugural artist-in-residence (2018), LACMA Art + Technology Lab Artist Grant (2014), Tiffany Foundation Grant (2008), Grand Arts Residency Fellowship (2007), and the Alice B. Kimball Fellowship (2006).