There’s a special perspective that comes from an island upbringing.”
It’s something artist Tavares Strachan knows well.
“When you grow up on an island — which is a beautiful place to grow up — there is a relationship to finiteness [paired] with infinity, because the landmass is small, but the ocean is big,” says the Nassau-born-and-raised Strachan.
Ever since, a good part of Strachan’s trajectory has been about escaping the bounds of that early experience of finiteness.
After high school, Strachan, who is now 46, left The Bahamas for college at the Rhode Island School of Design and then Yale University. Over the past two decades, he has risen to worldwide acclaim as a conceptual artist, winning a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022 and bringing his work to global stages, such as the Venice Biennale, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bass Museum of Art and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Strachan’s most renowned artworks center on themes of exploration, an interest he links to being from The Bahamas. “For me, exploration is very interesting because, you know, The Bahamas is like one of the first international cities in the world if you think about it. … [Christopher] Columbus landed on San Salvador in 1492 and, immediately, it became an international city,” says Strachan, whose work is also the subject of an eponymously titled new Phaidon book — the first comprehensive monograph on his art practice.
Far from restricting himself to the confines of an art studio, Strachan has set out on his own quests and missions across the world. Over the years, he has taken multiple expeditions to the Arctic, becoming the first-ever Bahamian to go to the North Pole — a trek which retraced the steps of the Black explorer Matthew Henson, who journeyed to the top of Earth with Robert Peary in 1909.
On a trip to the Alaskan Arctic in 2005, Strachan worked with a team to extract a 4.5-ton block of ice, which he then had transported to Nassau by FedEx. Once there, he displayed it at the elementary school he attended in a freezer powered by solar energy. Titled The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want, the frozen work brought to the fore themes of displacement and the fragility of our planet’s unique environments.
Strachan has also trained as an astronaut in Russia at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and immersed himself in deep-sea exploration during a residency at MIT, creating a submersible underwater diver out of blown glass. His experiences and investigations led to a multiyear, multimedia series called Orthostatic Tolerance, which refers to the health risks astronauts face when returning to Earth’s gravity. He’s even sent his work into space, launching a nanosatellite into orbit as part of a project called ENOCH, which shone a spotlight on the forgotten story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., who was the first African American in the U.S. space program.
But Strachan says he’s currently not feeling the urge to explore the outer edges of experience. “Maybe that desire will re-evolve at some point, but I have no current plans at the moment,” he says over lunch in Los Angeles at Fanny’s restaurant at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
He’d just come from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next door, having led a tour of The Day Tomorrow Began, the first major-museum survey of his work. (The show is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti through Jan. 3, 2027.)
The exhibition includes works about exploration, such as the glowing neon piece Robert, a life-size tribute to Lawrence Jr. But the show also puts defining aspects of Strachan’s childhood in The Bahamas front and center. There’s The Barbershop, a room-size installation that includes ceramic vessels depicting vintage imagery related to Black hair care. Another entire gallery is devoted to The Wash Hour, a grayed-out laundromat decorated with aphoristic signs that say things like “Please … Do not allow life to crush your children’s imagination. Thank You!”
The cultural heritage of The Bahamas is also present in Strachan’s large-scale installation Rice Grass Meadow, featuring ceramic busts of female figures, including singers Rita Marley and Nina Simone; the Queen of Sheba; and Andrea Crabtree, the first female deep-sea diver in the U.S. Army — all set amid tufts of dried rice plants. “Some of the color blocking comes from Junkanoo,” says Strachan, referencing the famed annual street festival and cultural celebration that takes place in The Bahamas at the end of each year. “The experience of the exhibition is multisensorial,” he says. “It’s music, sound, lighting, narrative, performance — all at once. And that’s what Junkanoo is. So yeah, the whole thing really is like Bahamas.”
Strachan shares that his festival experience came quite early in life and credits it with inspiring his creative impulses. “The story my mom tells me is that eight days after I was born, she took me to Junkanoo. So, my first encounter with art was through Junkanoo as an 8 day-old baby,” he says.
Eventually, as a kid, he joined a Junkanoo shack. “My uncles were in the [Junkanoo]
community, and they were like, ‘if you want to do it, come do it.’ I got involved in it when I was like 9 or 10 [years old],” he says. “You end up in a shack — that’s what we call the places where you make the costumes. You end up expressing whatever creative tendencies you may have in those spaces, which are great because they’re not overly formal. They’re like dudes making beautiful things.”
Strachan comes from a big family. His mom was one of 13 children, and his dad was one of 15. The artist himself has five siblings, and growing up, he loved exploring as part of a roving band of kids. “As a child, you spent a lot of time wandering through the bushes. There was a lot of open space, and you could just wander off for hours and go missing until dinner,” he recalls of a childhood spent swimming, riding bikes and fishing. He also remembers with fondness the abundant variety of fruit trees he encountered as a child, from guinep, dilly and sugar apple to mango, soursop, avocado, passion fruit and “any kind of citrus.”
While it may seem counterintuitive, he sees his penchant for exploration as springing from the sense of safety he felt as a child in a large family. “As a young boy, you feel protected when you have that many family members. Being nestled into a big group … it actually makes you quite courageous. I didn’t think anything was going to happen to me, and if it did, someone was going to protect me. And I think it encouraged me to just be bold,” he says.
Today, Strachan splits his time between New York City and Nassau, which he visits once a month on average. He admits to feeling like The Bahamas doesn’t have the same sense of “interconnectedness” it once had, which he ascribes to the number of visitors who travel there and never go off resort. “[When I was young,] there was a little bit more cultural collision than there is now,” he says. With an eye toward changing that, he’s currently renovating a building in Nassau and planning to open a commercial establishment there, though he’s not yet ready to share details about the project.
He also gives back to the local community through his organization Bahamas Air and Sea Exploration Center (B.A.S.E.C.). A collaboration with his mother, Ella Strachan, a seamstress, it offers classes for young people to learn about everything from rocketry and clothing design to traditional crafts. He’s in the process now of building out a permanent outpost for B.A.S.E.C. in Nassau that will include a bakery, a library and a makerspace. He and his mother also have a clothing line of the same name, first unveiled in 2018. B.A.S.E.C.’s capsule collections over the years have included everything from bomber jackets featuring iconography of the Bahamas to T-shirts and duffel bags. B.A.S.E.C.’s newest pieces include bags made in rattan and a series of pieces depicting the white-crowned pigeon, a bird found primarily in the Caribbean that is threatened by habitat loss. Proceeds from sales of B.A.S.E.C. items help support local schools and organizations like The Bahamas National Trust, which oversees wildlife conservation programs across the country.
For him, B.A.S.E.C. isn’t just a clothing line; it’s a way of communicating about culture and heritage. “The Bahamas has a beautiful opportunity to really place itself as a cornerstone of storytelling in the Caribbean,” says Strachan. “I think The Bahamas is interesting because there are so many stories.”
