Columbus Museum of Art hosts first major midwestern survey of conceptual pioneer Tavares Strachan
Tavares Strachan, A Map of the Crown (Amasunzu Black), 2023, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jonty Wilde.
COLUMBUS, OH.—
The Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti presents Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, the first major museum exhibition of the pathbreaking conceptual artist Tavares Strachan (b. 1979, Nassau, Bahamas). On view until January 3, 2027, the exhibition brings together nearly a decade of work across Strachan’s multidisciplinary practice, encompassing sculpture, painting, neon texts, and music. The survey includes Strachan’s Bar Room (2022/2025), a participatory installation that functions as a fully operational rum bar and café, which will remain permanently installed at The Pizzuti following the exhibition’s closing.
Co-organized by CMA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), The Day Tomorrow Began offers an immersive exploration of Strachan’s oeuvre, marked by a rigorous and poetic inquiry into knowledge systems, forms of historical memory, and spaces of communal belonging. The exhibition invites visitors to 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. The exhibition’s footprint also extends to the atrium of CMA’s Broad Street campus, where visitors will encounter Strachan’s In Praise of Midnight (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025), a twenty-foot-tall double equestrian statue that conjoins French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte with Haitian revolutionary leader Henri Christophe.
At the center of the exhibition is Strachan’s project The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), an encyclopedia of 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. Strachan’s ongoing research into “invisible” histories inspires many of the exhibition’s most ambitious works, from his In Praise of Midnight series—large-scale bronze statues that pair historical figures in reversals of fate and fortune—to ceramic sculptures exploring the historical iconography of Black haircare, and self-playing instruments rooted in legacies of Black musical composition. Accompanied by woven tapestries, wall-mounted ceramics, and Strachan’s Gemini series of word-search paintings, these works resonate as both a speculative archive and a lived environment—one that collapses distinctions between art, science, history, and everyday experience.
Embracing the roles of explorer and storyteller, Strachan has developed a singular artistic practice that fuses art, science, and cultural inquiry. Throughout his practice, Strachan foregrounds archival research into figures and forms of knowledge long obscured by historically canonized narratives, particularly in relation to the African diaspora, inviting visitors to reconsider how history is authored, remembered, and erased.
CMA’s presentation of The Day Tomorrow Began is anchored by Bar Room, a participatory installation acquired by the museum in 2024 and permanently installed at The Pizzuti in October 2025. Conceived as equal parts art installation, gathering place, and living archive, Bar Room forms a key part of the exhibition, as a site devoted to informal social exchange—and a celebration of the deep roots of Afro-Caribbean culture, especially reggae, in Columbus. Other works in the exhibition pay homage to Jamaican activist and orator Marcus Garvey, who visited Columbus in 1923 and was celebrated with a parade along Mt. Vernon Avenue.
“Tavares Strachan’s work prompts us to think critically about who is visible, who is remembered, and who is omitted from the stories we inherit,” said Brooke A. Minto, Executive Director and CEO of CMA. “We are so proud to present Strachan’s globally resonant landmark survey, alongside Bar Room, in Columbus, reaffirming this city as a vital site for artistic experimentation, intellectual discourse, and public engagement with the arts.”
Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began is co-organized by the Columbus Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The presentation at the Columbus Museum of Art is curated by Daniel Marcus, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions.
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. The artist 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. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between his studio in New York and Nassau, where he has established an art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center). He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2022), Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2019–20), Frontier Art Prize (2018), the Allen Institute’s inaugural artist-in-residence (2018), Tiffany Foundation Grant (2008), Grand Arts Residency Fellowship (2007), and Alice B. Kimball Fellowship (2006).
