Cover 1 of 2 ‘Starting From Paumanok,’ from Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ (1891-92) ‘Was somebody asking to see the soul? See, your own shape a nd countenance, persons, substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers, the rocks and sands. All hold spiritual joys and afterwards loosen them; How can the real body ever die and be buried?’

Why, nearly 130 Men’s Fashion years after his death, September 20, 2020 I SING the complicated, contradictory poet Walt Whitman is THE still an essential voice of the American experiment BODY THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE ELECTRIC MAGAZINE RIGHT NOW, SEVERAL hundred miles in this almost overly ambitious way,” said Eungie Joo, a curator at the San Francisco elements and diagrams. On one table, overhead, a golden urn with the face Museum of Modern Art and an early supporter of Strachan’s work. “Like, a photograph of two Arctic owls with of a forgotten man is circling Earth, a how could you go and train as an astronaut? That’s insane! That’s not ambition orange eyes partly covers a picture of passenger on a black satellite. “Enoch,” for anything that has been done before you — that’s just pure curiosity. That’s the Jamaican dance-hall artist Frankie one of Tavares Strachan’s most a brave curiosity. There’s no one like him in that way.” Paul, who in turn floats above a dazzling ambitious works of art, is a tribute to Sitting in one corner of Strachan’s studio was the work that serves as a skeleton telescopic view of the night sky. Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first key to Strachan’s expansive vision. Completed in 2018, “The Encyclopedia of These collide with a crossword puzzle, African-American astronaut, who died Invisibility” is both a sculpture and a functional 2,416-page book. Bound in navy glacial blue icebergs, a basketball and in a supersonic jet crash in 1967 before blue leather with gilt pages and an official-looking insignia on the cover, it bears three images of Haile Selassie I, the he could reach space. In 2018, after a winking resemblance to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but its 15,000 entries former emperor of Ethiopia, in military five years of obsessive effort, Strachan cover a range of subjects rarely found in traditional reference libraries. garb on the cover of an October 1952 managed to launch Lawrence’s Urban legends, invented languages, B-movies, mythical creatures and at least issue of Jet magazine. likeness into low orbit using a SpaceX one comic-book supervillain appear alongside entries on Haenyeo (the female Strachan’s approach to making Falcon 9 rocket. The project is just one deep-sea divers of South Korea), Tara Grinstead (an American high-school these works partially stems from what expression of the artist’s dedication to teacher and beauty queen who disappeared in 2005) and Galiteuthis glacialis he describes as the “gumbo-type” honoring the unseen and the unsung. (a large translucent squid found only in Antarctica). It’s the kind of stuff sampling methods of musicians he His life’s work has been a journey into “that you would never learn when you were a kid in school,” Strachan said. “The grew up listening to in the Bahamas the hidden machinery that determines Encyclopedia,” which anchors Strachan’s debut show with Marian Goodman at — Jamaican dub pioneers including who and what warrant remembrance. the gallery’s London branch this month, is playful — luminaries like the Cuban Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby. THE EXPLORER The artist Tavares Strachan is a perpetual student, known for his ambitious projects and intensive research, which have included expeditions to the North Pole, training as a cosmonaut in Russia and resurrecting the stories that history books have chosen to ignore. At a time when museums and galleries are overhauling their programming to better reflect the realities around them, the art world is learning from him. By Zoë Lescaze Photographs by Maegan Gindi

“It’s interesting to look at this body prima ballerina Alicia Alonso and the activist-comedian Dick Gregory brush up “That kind of making always stuck with of work — or all the work that I’ve against Josiah the badger, one of Theodore Roosevelt’s more unusual pets — but me,” he said. Powerfully built, been doing for the past two decades it is also subversive. with wide-set eyes and an open face — as a kind of protest,” Strachan said “While you have people protesting and marching the streets, and people half-covered by a thick beard, Strachan this summer, as he surveyed several working on a policy level to defund the police or to abolish certain oppressive (pronounced “Strawn” or “Stracken,” dozen large, kaleidoscopic paintings systems, it’s a necessary layer that artists, writers, creative and cultural he has no preference) wore a denim leaning against the walls of his studio, producers are also thinking about how these structures can be challenged,” apron, black T-shirt, jeans and a cotton a spacious ground-floor loft on the said Christine Y. Kim, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which kerchief around his neck — a sartorial northern border of Chelsea, in New supported the “Enoch” satellite launch. “Tavares’s interest in unpacking, choice that predates the pandemic-era York. To focus on subjects outside the upending and revising systems and structures of knowledge and history, as he need for masks. He settled in New York mainstream canon, “you have to has done with ‘The Encyclopedia of Invisibility,’ represents a perpetual in 2008, two years after completing his be really committed to it to keep them conceptual decolonization.” sculpture M.F.A. at Yale, and currently moving. Otherwise, they usually The global protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police lives with his family in Harlem. get swept under the rug.” Strachan’s officers had just erupted when I met Strachan in June. Frantic to express their The artist tends to speak with the passion for unearthing obscure solidarity with the movement, museums were pledging to analyze their roles unflappable self-possession of an trailblazers complements his own in promoting certain narratives at the expense of others (a 2019 study led by inveterate traveler, and he discusses audacious feats of exploration. The researchers from Williams College and other universities concluded that about his more ambitious exploits with a artist has embarked on four separate 85 percent of works in U.S. museum collections are by white artists). Strachan, matter-of-factness that belies the Arctic expeditions (he is the first however, was excavating marginalized characters from obscurity long before it complexity of the challenges he sets for Bahamian to visit the North Pole) and became an obligation. The artist is now something of an authority on how to himself. He has spent his life seeking trained as a Russian cosmonaut tell lost stories: Several conservation specialists from the American Museum of out seemingly unattainable goals with at a military facility in Moscow — all Natural History recently visited Strachan’s studio to discuss how they might the vehement defiance of someone who before turning 40 and without the acknowledge Matthew Henson, the Black explorer who, despite having grew up being told there were limits support of a commercial gallery or journeyed to the North Pole in 1909 with the more famous white adventurer to what he could achieve. Talking to an Amex black card. Robert Peary, is rarely credited. him, one begins to believe that anyone “Tavares has always taken on Lately, Strachan has been deconstructing “The Encyclopedia,” using its pages who doesn’t attempt the impossible

62 science and knowledge and possibility as collage elements in towering works that combine text, found images, painted suffers from a lack of imagination. D’AMOUR CURTS ASSISTANT: PHOTO STRACHAN WAS BORN in Nassau in 1979, the second of six boys, in a house His wanderlust is, in part, a means of Strachan remembers wondering that could fit on one of his two studio balconies. His father was an officer coping with this sense of disconnect. whether he had made the biggest and administrator for the police, and his mother was a seamstress and “The only way to survive is to embrace mistake of his life. “The story of glass dressmaker. “We were poor, but we didn’t know it,” he said. “No one told us, exploration, right?” he said. “To is very similar to my story, in some which is awesome.” The Bahamas was a stop on the narcotics route in embrace being a foreigner.” ways,” he said. “It’s a set of paradoxes: the ’80s, and drug money flowed through the islands. “I grew up around While studying painting at the It’s fragile, but it’s as strong as a certain amount of violence — not in my home but in the neighborhood,” University of the Bahamas, Strachan concrete under pressure. It’s super he said. His response was an early indication of the curiosity and heard about the Rhode Island School precious, but it’s ubiquitous, like it’s self-direction that have guided his career: Around age 10, he started of Design as a place where “you everywhere. It has memory built into gardening. Tending plants was an escape, a way to feel calm. Today, Strachan can make anything.” He sold a series it. So if you are working on a piece of maintains a garden on the roof of his building uptown, growing tomatoes, of small drawings to a local collector to glass and you touch it, you scar it. grapes, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, corn, eucalyptus and chamomile. help cover the first installment of You can heat it up again, but that scar As a child, the artist never really goes away.” explored New Providence He worked every campus Island, a strip of land just job he could, but it wasn’t 21 miles long and 7 miles enough. Eventually the wide, disappearing for provost delivered some bad hours at a time with news: If he couldn’t pay, his brothers. “I think the he had to leave. Strachan said sense of isolation, for me, that wasn’t going to happen. created this kind of The provost explained imaginary universe,” that the school was out of he said. As a teenager, he financial aid, but Strachan spent months at a time remained firm, and finally on open water fishing for the provost said, “Give me a red snapper. Dolphins month. Let me see what I can would burst from the do.” Eventually, RISD put up waves, and at night, miles the money he needed to stay of jellyfish would drift by (Strachan now sits on the the boat, glowing a radiant school’s board of trustees). alien green. The experience of negotiating As Strachan grew older, for his education proved though, he came to almost as transformative as understand the limitations the education itself. It of his surroundings. “became this kind of blueprint “You could tell that there moment for my life story, in was a ceiling,” he said. a way,” he said. “They said no “People who you knew — a bunch of times — and weren’t going off to do then they said yes.” unbelievable things that For his senior thesis in would be on CNN.” The 2003, Strachan sent a light only forms of success were meter to his mother’s house becoming a doctor, a in Nassau, wrote software lawyer or an engineer. If that would transmit the live you weren’t one of those, readings over the internet “you were irrelevant.” and crafted a plexiglass light Nevertheless, Strachan box that emitted the lumens decided to become an of his childhood bedroom. artist. Telling his parents, “In the early 2000s, for a who had left school as young artist to have that kind teenagers to work, was a of poetic and conceptual wrenching experience. rigor applied in this way was “It’s so lonely. It’s not like Tavares Strachan in very striking — is very striking his New York City your family’s familiar studio, photographed even today,” said Joo, who with it . . . so you have this on June 19, 2020. included Strachan in a New moment where you’re York gallery show that year. learning a language that In March 2005, the artist they generally won’t be (who by this time was at Yale) able to speak moving forward,” he said, but “there’s a certain solace in that his tuition and a flight to Providence, R.I. went to northern Alaska and cut isolation and a certain magic and beauty in that isolation.” Strachan chose the school’s demanding a 4.5-ton block of ice out of a frozen This personal dislocation was underscored by a gradual discovery of why he glass program because there was nothing river. He shipped it to the Bahamas, and his family were in Nassau at all. “The trans-Atlantic slave story is not really like it at home, but also for reasons titling the sculpture “The Distance articulated well there,” he said. “So you’re just on an island, and you’re just both practical (“I wanted to learn a skill Between What We Have and What We like, ‘All right, something doesn’t really add up.’ ” Being there, unable to trace his that I couldn’t lose”) and roguish (“I Want,” and installed it in a solar- ancestry back more than a few generations, began to feel like being nowhere. think I learned it was the most expensive powered freezer in the courtyard of Strachan now thinks of his projects as a form of retroactive cartography and a program in the school to run”). his elementary school. Christopher means of reorienting himself. “To me, they all came back to this idea of trying to Glass is a punishing material to master Hoover, an acquaintance with a

understand myself, my environment, my community and also the future,” he said. — the learning curve is steep — and background in film production, helped 63 secure funding, a ground crew and discounts from shippers. “It didn’t come off as essential for Strachan, for whom the created by society. Science is widely ridiculous,” said Hoover, who became a friend and frequent collaborator, recalling usual academic definitions of research held to be an objective, authoritative the moment Strachan pitched him the almost absurdly daunting project. “I could are insufficient. “I needed to go and discipline, but Strachan’s work tell he was someone who wanted to follow through on those ambitions.” The piece experience it versus reading about it,” reminds us that it is also a subjective, was at once monolithic and mercurial. Delicate fissures would form in the ice he said. Every part of the trip was a interpretive practice that exists and vanish again with subtle fluctuations in temperature. The translucency would challenge, from the stomach-churning within larger systems of control. “A change, and so would the luminous shades of blue and green. The students at the effects of being strapped in a chair huge part of scientific narrative has to school were as stunned by the work as they were delighted — most of them and spun upside down, to the more do with power,” he said. Biology was didn’t know that ice formed in nature. It might as well have been a spaceship. intangible ones: “It’s hairy being for centuries used to legitimize It was the response Strachan had hoped for. He wanted to confront the a Black man in Russia,” he said. But racist eugenic theories and colonial children with something alien to show “that otherness is OK,” and to inspire physical and mental discomfort oppression, and even now, science a curiosity about the world beyond. “I think being an artist, to me, always “parallels nicely with the project of remains part of a capitalist structure, had to do with disrupting some system or another, and just putting that piece being an artist.” one that determines which types of of ice there . . . was the most disruptive thing I thought I could have done,” he research get funding and support. said. It was the opening salvo in what became a long crusade to expose young DURING THE EARLY stages of On a more personal level, though, people in the Bahamas (and elsewhere) to the forms of knowledge he wishes Strachan’s career, each piece became creating artworks that double as he had encountered as a child. a strategic means of funding the next scientific experiments or feats of one. “If he sold an artwork . . . it’s not engineering is a way for Strachan to like he bought himself some shoes navigate the definitions of success that An in-progress bust or whatever,” said Hoover, who noted shaped his childhood. “Co-opting in Strachan’s studio of that he was impressed that Strachan that language [of science] became a Queen Elizabeth morphing into Shirley didn’t just want to “do expensive kind of defense mechanism,” he said. Chisholm, who in 1968 things, but [that] he wanted to do these “I always felt like it gave me a kind of became the first Black expensive things to invest in himself.” authority.” Science and medicine woman to be elected to Congress. The artist’s In the case of the cosmonaut training, have, traditionally, been avenues for work has often looked Strachan convinced Grand Arts, an immigrants and marginalized people at colonialism and its erstwhile project space in Kansas City, to enter the academy and gain status long shadow. Mo., founded by Margaret Silva (a and power in the West. Strachan Hallmark heiress), to underwrite the did not become a doctor or scientist experience. The negotiation process in the typical sense, but he has felt familiar. “Rewind back to RISD, used the authoritative trappings of rewind back to the meeting with the these disciplines to make people provost,” he said. “You ask 16 times, pay attention to his art. “That’s how and the 17th time, you get it.” I managed that question about Strachan’s refusal to take no for an expectation in a colony where the answer is inextricably tied to the life value of success is placed on law he left behind in the Bahamas. Seeking and medicine and science and hard-to-reach places with no engineering,” he said. “If you weren’t guarantee of success is what motivates one of those things, no one really him, and the uphill process of blasting paid attention.” But, he added, “It’s through invisible barriers is as hard to dismiss four tons of ice in a important to him as the physical M.I.T.-built freezer system.” objects that might result. “I do imagine “He’s not exactly an artist who that these actions add up to works with science or scientists — he’s something, but I think for me the joy kind of an artist who is also a scientist,” of it is the pursuit,” he said. “And said Joo, who compared Strachan’s there’s a certain pain-to-pleasure ratio fluency in various disciplines to that of in that pursuit, because it’s a super Leonardo da Vinci. “He’s not behaving risky enterprise, it’s a risky set of the way an artist should behave.” problems that you’re creating and inventing for yourself — and it’s why IN 2013, STRACHAN’S delight in I think most artists do what they do.” thwarting expectations culminated at Most artists, though, do not train the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest as astronauts to make work about and most prestigious recurrent art space travel. Strachan sees artists like exhibition, where he helmed the first Titus Kaphar and Tala Madani — national pavilion for the Bahamas. To that end, Strachan later established the Bahamas Air and Sea Exploration painters who engage, in markedly “The very idea to have a pavilion Center (B.A.S.E.C.), a community organization where children can perform different ways, with issues of would in some ways seem absurd,” said experiments, conduct research and meet visiting artists and scientists. “With a representation and the Western Christophe Thompson, a childhood collapsing educational system and the distraction of tourism, a focus on canon — as his immediate peers, but friend and longtime collaborator, developing an agency that allows its citizens to expand beyond its waters seems his scientific experiments, adventures citing the country’s tiny population appropriate,” Strachan wrote about B.A.S.E.C. “This project, though difficult to remote destinations and pure (just under 390,000 people spread for me to summarize, comes down to the belief in the possibilities of what art can ambition set him apart. For Strachan, across 700 islands) and total remove do and where it may take us.” Strachan launched B.A.S.E.C. in 2011, which science is not just a subject but a from the Biennale. But the idea of supports teaching programs in the Bahamas with a clothing line exclusively made medium, one that allows him to aim representing a place that the art world by locals in collaboration with his mother. a floodlight at the shadowy reality tends to treat as invisible on its That project is tied to Strachan’s training as a cosmonaut at Star City, a that knowledge and truth do not just grandest stage appealed to Strachan

64 complex of Brutalist buildings about an hour east of Moscow. Being there was exist in the world but are actively precisely because it didn’t make sense. STRACHAN, VECERAITE; TAVARES JURATE BY PHOTO OF THE ARTIST, COURTESY PANELS, TWO OIL, ENAMEL AND PIGMENT ON ACRYLIC, 2020, KNEE SHALL BOW,” “EVERY STRACHAN, TAVARES FROM TOP: OPPOSITE PAGE, JOE VINCENT GRAY BY PHOTO OF THE ARTIST, NEW ORLEANS TRIENNIAL), COURTESY ON THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER (PROSPECT.3, INSTALLATION TRAVELING OUT NEON ON 100-FT BARGE, BLOCKED 2014, HERE,” BELONG “YOU It was a means, too, of working through his own Right: “Every Knee conflicted relationship to his homeland. “Thinking Shall Bow” (2020), a painting featuring about home, for me, it always has a pretty huge air of Queen Elizabeth and, melancholy, and I find that’s true for a lot of people,” on the cover of Jet said Strachan. “It’s really hard to talk about. When magazine, Haile Selassie I, the former you’re an artist from the Caribbean and you move emperor of Ethiopia. to the West, or you move to the States, or you move to Below: “You Belong any kind of center, you’re self-conscious of the Here” (2014), a neon installation on a barge smallness of the place from which you’ve come.” that sailed down the No matter where in the world Strachan’s projects Mississippi River in lead him, they are always rooted in his experience New Orleans during “Prospect.3: Notes for of being from a former colony — a place that has, Now,” a citywide historically, been the object, not the agent, of exhibition there in 2014. discovery. His drive to explore remote places and see them for himself upends the old expectation that growing up on the margins means always being the observed and never the observer. The figures he celebrates in his work are people who, like him, have defied the narrow roles they were given and struck out into uncharted territory. Strachan dedicated the pavilion in Venice to Henson, the Black Arctic explorer, who planted a flag at what he and Peary believed was the North Pole. Going to the North Pole in 1909 was not unlike going to the moon in the minds of Western adventurers — it was an astounding place for anyone to have successfully ventured, particularly an African-American man who began his career as a deckhand. Naturally, Strachan had to retrace Henson’s most epic pursuits: At the root of it is absurdity,” he already emblazoned on the facade of Compound, journey. The expedition represented a form of said. The collision of human ambition and elusive a new exhibition space in Los Angeles. research, but Strachan also sensed he might discover gratification that the pole represents “is central to The seemingly anodyne expressions are meant a strange affinity between the tropical island on everything that I’m thinking about.” to provoke a certain amount of skepticism in the which he was raised and the frozen top of the globe. The resulting installation included panoramic viewer. If neon is the language of advertising and The North Pole is more of an idea than a real photos of Strachan carrying his personal flag storefront seduction, what are these works selling? place. The mathematical point might exist, but the (a banner modeled on Peary’s, reimagined in Lately, amid the protests, Strachan imagines spot where all lines of longitude converge occurs Bahamian gold, black and blue) across a vast the sentiments might strike some perpetually on a shifting ice cap that is constantly splitting, expanse of white, along with hunks of polar ice, disenfranchised people as ludicrous. “It’s a melting and reforming itself. Planting a flag at the anatomical renderings of Henson and phrases seemingly friendly gesture kind of couched in an Pole was a dream that consumed countless written in white neon. The voices of 40 Bahamian array of really tough questions,” he said of the piece explorers who did not account for the fact that by children singing a welcome song in Inupiat, a Native in Los Angeles. “Like, who’s the you? How are we the time they got one upright, it would be in the language of northern Alaska, echoed throughout defining ‘here’? And who gets to belong?” wrong spot. Just standing at the pole for any amount the space, linking Strachan’s island home, the North Belonging lies at the heart of Strachan’s most of time is an unattainable quest — which is partly Pole and a European capital in a web of obvious poignant projects, the works that honor pioneers why Strachan wanted to try. “It’s the truth about contrast and unlikely kinship: Rising sea levels on the margins of the remembrance. Who belongs on may consume both the the cover of a high-school history book or on a plinth Bahamas and Venice, in a public square? Who makes these decisions? while colonial forces Among the entries in “The Encyclopedia of have ransacked Inuit land Invisibility” is Mary J. Bonnin, the first female master and traditions. Strachan diver in the U.S. Navy, who enlisted at a time when effectively asked viewers there were few women in the military and faced to consider improbable resistance from male servicemen. An expert in both cultural affinities in the air and gas diving, Bonnin graduated at the top of her context of an exhibition class and trained over 1,000 other divers over the born of old, nationalist course of her tour. In 2010, Strachan completed concepts of identity. “What Will Be Remembered in the Face of All That Is Later this month, Forgotten (I),” a life-size blown-glass diver submerged Strachan will unveil a in a tank filled with mineral oil. “I had no idea that new installation in he even knew who I was, so it was kind of a shock,” Colorado, where colossal said Bonnin, who retired in 1996 and now owns a UPS neon pink letters will store in Panama City, Fla. “But it made me feel really spell out “We Are in good that someone would actually take a piece and This Together” on the dedicate it to me. That was kind of fantastic.” At first slope below a gondola glance, the vitrine might seem empty — because glass connecting neighboring has a similar refraction index as oil, it disappears ski towns. Another neon when submerged. But a change in perspective reveals piece, one of his most the delicate human form. Like Strachan’s other visible to date, reading unseen subjects, the diver suddenly becomes visible,

“You Belong Here,” is and her greatness comes into view. 65