Tavares Strachan’s Immersive Multisensory Installations at LACMA

That sense of rhythm and release animates The Day Tomorrow Began, Strachan’s first major Los Angeles museum exhibition. Co-organized with the Columbus Museum of Art and curated at LACMA by Diana Nawi, the show gathers more than 20 new works, including one of Strachan’s largest neon pieces and sculptures to date. Together, they form a kind of visual symphony, blending sculpture, painting, and text into a multisensory meditation on history, ritual, and the Black diaspora.

Experiencing the exhibition, visitors move through a sequence of thematic rooms, shifting continually between the personal and the historical. A 2022 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Strachan inverts bodies and belief systems, layers faces within symbols, and asks viewers to reconsider not just events, but how history itself is constructed.

The journey begins in The Encyclopedia Room, anchored by The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (walnut #3) (2018), a 17,000-entry reference work documenting people, places, and events omitted from mainstream history. Pages from the book appear in Six Thousand Years (2018), a wall-sized collage spanning cartographers, activists, and memorials such as the 1991 Santa Cruz Massacre in East Timor, where Indonesian troops killed at least 250 peaceful protesters.

From there, visitors enter The Barbershop, a full-scale reconstruction of an everyday ritual space. Two flocked-hair paintings, Mind Field No. 3 and No. 5 (2023), hang beside bronze busts from A Map of the Crown series (2023), linking craftsmanship and community through the iconography of Black haircare.

Nearby, Monument Hall offers a second kind of recontextualization—heroes (and their oppressors)—from Strachan’s encyclopedia recast in bronze. In Praise of Midnight (Christophe x Napoleon) (2025) pairs Haitian King Henri Christophe with an inverted Napoleon Bonaparte, referencing France’s failed attempt to reinstate slavery in Haiti. Other juxtapositions, such as In Praise of Midnight (Biko x Churchill) (2025), place resistance and empire in direct confrontation.

Space exploration, a recurring motif in Strachan’s practice, appears in Robert (2018), a neon rendering of astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut in the United States, and in ENOCH (Display Unit) (2015–17), a gold canopic jar sculpture launched into orbit via SpaceX in 2018.

The exhibition closes with The Wash House, where phrases such as “The laundry remembers” and “Some loads are too heavy to carry alone” ripple through the space—some inscribed, others voiced—underscoring cleansing as both ritual and remembrance.

“Tavares’ practice is so committed to the idea, kind of alluded to in the title, that history is malleable—something you can continue to revisit and rewrite,” said Nawi. Museum CEO and Director Michael Govan agrees, saying in an interview that he has been “listening” to Strachan’s work for a decade, considering how histories and ancestry are consumed and recontextualized. He noted that it is an accident of timing that the show closes shortly before the new David Geffen Galleries open in April, but added that the “puzzles and patterns” of Strachan’s work mirror LACMA’s evolving curatorial philosophy.

For Strachan, The Day Tomorrow Began is ultimately an act of gratitude. “Everything I do is an appreciation for the ancestors,” he said. “There’s a long lineage that brings all of us together. The future depends on how well we handle that delicate moment between one day and the next.”