LACMA to present Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, the artist’s first major museum exhibition in Los Angeles.
Introducing more than 20 new works— including the artist’s most expansive neon piece and one of his largest sculptures todate—this multi-sensory exhibition spotlights Strachan’s excavation of histories that have been rendered invisible within mainstream narratives, particularly in relation to the Black diaspora. Weaving together sculpture, painting, text, and music, The Day Tomorrow Began transports visitors to unique environments ranging from uncanny everyday spaces to surreal landscapes. In these immersive spaces, Strachan invites his audience to rethink the ways in which we represent and discuss history, and more significantly, what histories we lionize.
LACMA’s presentation of The Day Tomorrow Began is curated by Diana Nawi, Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA, and co-organized with the Columbus Museum of Art. The exhibition is made possible by The Hyundai Project at LACMA, part of the museum’s ongoing partnership with Hyundai Motor Company. Launched in 2015, this initiative is the longest and largest programmatic commitment from a corporate supporter in LACMA’s history.
“This exhibition is an opportunity for viewers to not only engage with the diversity of concepts and hybrid approaches that animate Tavares’s practice, but also to experience his attention to the craft of object-making and the importance of world building,”
Diana Nawi, Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA
The exhibition evokes a barbershop, a laundromat, a field of Indian Rice Grass, and other scenes across seven galleries. Highlights include: Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018) is Strachan’s take on the Britannica
encyclopedia. With more than 2,000 pages and an amalgamation of over 17,000 entries, this artwork relays information about people, places, events, and stories that the artist feels have been rendered “invisible” in mainstream narratives.
A new body of work brings the craft of ceramic pots together with the iconography and history of Black haircare, a recurrent theme in the artist’s practice. ENOCH (2018) and Robert (2018, first image above) highlight the artist’s longstanding engagement with space exploration, and in particular the story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut in the United States. ENOCH, a canopic jar that features a sculpted portrait of the astronaut, emerged from the artist’s participation in LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, presented by Hyundai Motor, through which he collaborated with SpaceX to launch this artwork into orbit around Earth.
A new large-scale neon meditates on two quotes from renowned American authors and thinkers James Baldwin and Mark Twain. Mirroring each other, both excerpts address our aspirational impulses and the possibility of recognizing our own potential and shared humanity.
A collection of new bronze sculptures addresses the form and the role of public monuments, not only asking who we choose to commemorate, but also interrogating our broader impulse to laud individual figures. The series installation includes Flip Monument (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025), a towering 16.5-foot-tall resin icon engineered specifically for LACMA’s galleries.
Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began October 12th, 2025–March 29th, 2026 LACMA
Publication: LACMA has worked closely with the artist to produce a publication that accompanies this exhibition. Rather than adhering to a traditional catalogue format, the book reflects Strachan’s interest in annotation over explanation. It brings together interviews and first-person writings that range in topic from the artist’s personal biography to a discussion with the leader of a Junkanoo group in Nassau, to a meditation on the contemporary relevance (or irrelevance) of public monuments. Each of these speak to facets of the artist’s work, revealing the breadth and unlikely combination of influences that come together in his practice. Taken together they also suggest the myriad ways culture is produced, preserved, and challenged. Contributors include the artist’s mother, the leader of the One Family Junkanoo group, and the director of Monument Lab, among others. This compendium is copublished by LACMA and Delmonico Books/D.A.P.
About the artist
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).
The Day Tomorrow Began is the latest chapter in a decade-long partnership with LACMA. Strachan was a recipient of LACMA’s 2014 Art + Technology Lab Artist Grant, which facilitated his 3U satellite project, ENOCH. On December 3, 2018, the work was launched into space via Spaceflight’s SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. With support from LACMA’s engineering team, ENOCH circled Earth for three years, orbiting approximately five times daily, before returning in 2021. The project was included in LACMA’s exhibition Black American Portraits (2021–22). Strachan has also contributed to shows including View From Here: Recent Acquisitions (2020–21);
Mapping the Infinite: Cosmologies Across Culture, as part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide (2024–25); and Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics (2024–25).
