Tavares Strachan’s monumental sculpture has been unveiled in the Royal Academy Courtyard. The First Supper, 2021-23 is a major new sculpture by acclaimed interdisciplinary artist Tavares Strachan (b. 1979, Nassau, The Bahamas), as part of the exhibition Entangled Pasts: 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change which opens on this Saturday 3rd February.
The sculpture in the Royal Academy’s Annenberg Courtyard is Strachan’s most ambitious and substantial work to date. Meticulously constructed over the course of four years, The First Supper extends the artist’s interest in ideas of visibility and invisibility, materialising his commitment to individuals and communities whose stories have been overlooked or forgotten.
The First Supper represents what Strachan describes as a utopian gathering that brings together historically significant figures from the continent of Africa and its diasporas, accompanied by a thylacine or Tasmanian tiger and a portrait of the artist. It includes sculptural portraits of resistance fighter Zumbi Dos Palmares; nurse Mary Seacole; activists Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Marsha P. Johnson; explorer Matthew Henson; astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence; politician Shirley Chisholm; Emperor Haile Selassie; musicians Sister Rosetta Tharpe and King Tubby; and poet Sir Derek Alton Walcott. Although some of the figures around the table are well-known, others have been forgotten and are not widely studied.
The First Supper is a celebration of commensality – the act of eating together. It emphasises the role of communal meals in forging and sustaining social relationships, with Strachan describing the sharing of food and conversation as “part of the fabric of human experience.” The specific foods represented in The First Supper also point to broader spiritual, philosophical, and ideological perspectives guiding the sculpture. Spread out across the table are items such as African rice, breadfruit, catfish, chicken, cocoa, custard apple, and soursop. These foods consumed in the Caribbean have been traced to Indigenous and African influences, along with the histories of enslavement and indentured servitude. For example, enslaved people carrying African rice played a crucial role in the expansion of rice cultivation in the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. These subtle but critical quotations enrich the sculpture, allowing it to engage with broader issues of technology transfer, Indigenous knowledge, and agency. Strachan’s use of cast bronze embellished with a gold patina references material cultures and trade networks in Africa. Some of the earliest and most accomplished bronze works found in Africa date to the tenth century and are among the first examples of lost-wax casting techniques in the production of bronze sculpture. Certain figures and details are embellished with gold leaf, a material that is also culturally loaded. As Strachan notes “gold is one of Africa’s most abundant natural resources and has indisputably shaped its history and its people throughout time.” West Africa was also one of the world’s leading exporters of gold during the Middle Ages, but the material also drew Europeans to the ‘Gold Coast’ in the fifteenth century.
The exhibition Entangled Pasts: 1768-now, of which The First Supper is a part, will explore art and its role in shaping narratives in Britain around empire, enslavement, indenture, resistance, and abolition. The First Supper acknowledges these complex histories while pointing to the future, to stories unwritten and conversations yet to come.
Entangled Pasts: 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change will run in the Royal Academy’s Main
Galleries from 3rd February to 28th April 2024.
About the artist
Tavares Strachan (b. 1979, Nassau, Bahamas) 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 embodies the migratory, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and open-ended nature of contemporary artmaking. Extensively researched, his projects are realized in collaboration with specialists and organizations across a wide spectrum of fields. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between New York and Nassau in the Bahamas, where he has established the art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) and OKU, a not-for-profit community project encompassing an artist residency and exhibition spaces, a scholarship scheme, and after-school creative programs. In 2022, Strachan was a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” awarded to individuals of extraordinary talent who have demonstrated originality and dedication in their creative pursuits.
