Tavares Strachan
Born in Nassau, 1979 and lives in NYC, USA
After studying painting and liberal arts at both College of the Bahamas in Nassau and at Brown, Tavares Strachan received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied glass, and an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. Recurring themes in Strachan’s work include invisibility, displacement (both physical and metaphorical), and the capacity of both persons and matter to withstand inhospitable environments. Strachan’s work emphasizes the migratory, cross-cultural nature of contemporary artistic production, and unsettles canonized histories and geographies.
Strachan’s research on the topic has extended to hands-on training at the Yuri Gagarin Russian State Science Research Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia; a journey to the Arctic in commemoration of the 1909 journey of African-American explorer Matthew Henson; and a residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with some of the institution’s cutting-edge scientists. It also led to the establishment of the nascent Bahamian Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center in the Bahamas (BASEC). In the course of working with BASEC, Strachan has made several rockets wholly from Bahamian natural resources (glass from beach sand, and fuel from sugarcane) and launched them 15 to 20 miles into the earth’s stratosphere, before collecting and presenting their fallen remnants as sculptural relics.
