Tavares Strachan (b. 1979) was that kid. Growing up in Nassau, Bahamas he was always into something. Curious. The “Why? Why? Why?” kid. Precocious.

“I had to be convinced,” Strachan told me via video interview. “If it didn't make any sense, then it wasn't going to work.”

Nowadays, the conceptual artist considers himself an “explorer,” the evolution of an inquisitive kid always asking questions, always wanting to know more, rarely satisfied with pat answers. Personality traits reflected in his artwork.

Strachan has developed a practice fusing art, science, and cultural inquiry. He foregrounds archival research into figures and forms of knowledge long obscured by historically canonized narratives, particularly in relation to the Black diaspora, inviting visitors to reconsider how history is authored, remembered, and erased.

The intersection of art, science, and politics.

A rigorous and poetic inquiry into knowledge systems, forms of historical memory, and spaces of communal belonging.

“I love going places and finding things out about the world,” Strachan said.

Visitors can go to the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti to find out more about the artist during “Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began,” his first major museum exhibition on view through January 3, 2027. The presentation brings together nearly a decade of work across Strachan’s multidisciplinary practice, encompassing sculpture, painting, neon texts, and music. Artworks that exist partially to help Strachan explain the world around him.

“When you are a Caribbean youth living in an environment where it doesn't make sense, you don't feel like you fit; on some level it forces you to question the environment that you're living in, and those questions are personal,” he said. “Where do I fit in the equation, or my people, or my community? Any group of people in that situation, historically speaking, they've asked the same questions about belonging.”

What “doesn’t make sense” to Strachan about the surroundings of his Caribbean youth? He offers a concrete example–literally and figuratively.

“Systems of weight and oppression work cumulatively, and a lot of them are subtle. The best ones are subtle,” he said. “If you visit any Caribbean island, you start to realize that much of the architecture is colonial. When you’re growing up in that environment, you are either consciously or subconsciously being subdued to living in spaces that to some degree are conveying to you some message about what your place is in that system. That’s a subtle one. You grow up, you were born in a building, you just think, ‘Well, this is just a building,’ but culture on deep levels informs you about your experience and about what your place is in that system. If 98% of the buildings are colonial buildings and you're from Africa, then it's not going to make sense.”

‘The Encyclopedia of Invisibility’

At the center of the Columbus exhibition is Strachan’s The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), over 2,000 pages and over 17,000 entries dedicated to people, places, and ideas that have been marginalized, erased, and overlooked in mainstream historical narratives. Visitors are encouraged to think critically about who is visible, who is remembered, and who is omitted from the stories we inherit.

And ask why.

“History is really about power,” Strachan said. “If you draw a line between physical gifts, access to capital, geography, etc., etc., you start to realize that the ability to tell stories is a distinctive part of how human beings have evolved this relationship to power. When we were in the caves, one signifier of our evolution was that we were drawing and painting on the walls, and that meant you were well fed and had shelter and fire. History is an extension of that. If you are in a position where you can tell these histories, it means that you’re in a privileged position because you have water and fire and shelter.”

Strachan’s ongoing research into “invisible” histories inspires many of the exhibition’s most ambitious works including his Flip Monuments—large-scale bronze statues that pair historical figures in reversals of fate and fortune—an example of which can be seen at the Columbus Museum of Art’s main building. Visitors there encounter Flip Monument (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025), a 20-foot-tall double equestrian statue that conjoins French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte with Haitian revolutionary leader Henri Christophe.

At the Pizzuti, guests further explore a sequence of carefully staged environments, including a barbershop, a field of rice grass, and a hall of monuments, each of which challenges the conventions of museum display, while also calling into question hierarchies of visibility and invisibility.

“I love when worlds collide, when something feels like it could be a set, or it could be a place of the everyday. That collision is good for me, but also for the world, because it collapses the museum and it makes people who are not from that world feel like they may have some room in that world,” Strachan said. “It's nice when people go into a museum and they don't feel like they're in one.”

‘Bar Room’

“The Day Tomorrow Began” is anchored by Bar Room, a participatory installation that functions as a fully operational rum bar and café and will remain permanently installed at The Pizzuti following the exhibition’s closing. It was acquired by the museum in 2024 and permanently installed in October 2025. Conceived as equal parts art installation, gathering place, and living archive, Bar Room serves as a site devoted to informal social exchange—and a celebration of the deep roots of Afro-Caribbean culture, especially reggae, in Columbus.

Afro-Caribbean culture and reggae in Columbus, Ohio? Middle America?

Yes.

“There aren’t many places in the that haven’t been impacted by Black labor. If you look at any major city in the world, specifically in Europe or the West, it's probably been affected, impacted significantly, by skilled labor coming across the Atlantic to execute the will of the empire. Columbus is no different,” Strachan explained. “Columbus has serious diasporic roots. There's a record store called Roots Records in Columbus that has had all of the best artists in the Caribbean come to put on shows; it's a rich, thriving, diaspora community there.”

Bar Room is open for cocktails, beer, wine, spirits, coffee and tea, light bites and desserts, Thursday from 2:00 to 8:00 PM, Friday and Saturday from 2:00 PM until 10:00 PM, and Sunday from 10:00 AM until 4:00 PM.

“The Bar Room, in a way, is a place and a non-place. It’s a work of fiction in the sense that it was an installation in a gallery in New York a few years ago. That work was then acquired by the museum, and that museum then converted into a functioning bar,” Strachan said. “The feeling of it is quite real, and I think that’s to do with the community; you’re living in a concept that has become reality that still exists within the realm of concept because of its art status. It does a weird thing with your brain when you're in it. It really touches people because it touched me when I was growing up. The original Bar Room design was a concept designed after spaces I grew up spending time in.”

Last Call

Located in Columbus’ Short North Arts District, the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti was established as the Pizzuti Collection by Ron and Ann Pizzuti. The building and a selection of artworks were gifted to CMA in 2019. The site serves as a hub for artist-driven projects.

Coinciding with the exhibition, a comprehensive monograph, Tavares Strachan, will be released by Phaidon this summer, joining its acclaimed Contemporary Artists Series.

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