Bahamian-born artist Tavares Strachan makes his first major Los Angeles museum debut at LACMA, and it's an institutional statement as much as it is an exhibition. Spanning more than 20 new works — including his most expansive neon piece and one of his largest sculptures to date — the show excavates histories rendered invisible within mainstream narratives, particularly those of the Black diaspora.
Spread across seven galleries, Strachan transforms the museum into immersive environments drawn from his childhood — a barbershop with black walls and costumed performers, a laundromat with churning washing machines, a surreal field of Indian Rice Grass. These aren't decorative choices. They're arguments about whose spaces and whose stories get taken seriously.
The anchor piece is Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018) — a massive, 17,000-entry tome bound in goatskin, printed on opaque paper, featuring underrecognized figures like Black explorer Matthew Henson, who was among the first to reach the North Pole. It's Strachan's direct response to the Britannica: if you're bold enough to define all human knowledge, he asks, what are you leaving out?
Also on view: ENOCH (2018), a canopic jar featuring a sculpted portrait of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut in the U.S. — a piece Strachan launched into orbit in collaboration with SpaceX through LACMA's Art + Technology Lab. The monument series is equally pointed: Flip Monument (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025) stands 16.5 feet tall, interrogating not just who gets commemorated, but the broader cultural impulse to elevate individual figures.
Strachan is working in the space between art, science, and politics — asking what gets written into history, what gets erased, and who holds the pen.
On view October 12, 2025 – March 29, 2026 at LACMA, BCAM Level 2.
🔗 Exhibition page — LACMA
📸 LACMA on Instagram
📸 Tavares Strachan on Instagram
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