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A Capacity for World-Building

admin

2026年1月7日
3 min read
Capacity WorldBuilding

In 2018, I had the privilege of serving as a juror for the Frontier Art Prize, which honored artists whose work embodied a pioneering spirit and addressed global challenges. That year the recipient was Tavares Strachan, an artist born in the Bahamas in 1979. From the moment I met him, I was struck by his capacity for world-building. I was particularly intrigued by the project he led with children in the Bahamas which connected imagination, research, and community. In many ways, the prize foreshadowed the expansive vision realized in his current exhibition, The Day Tomorrow Began, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Tavares Strachan, Six Thousand Years, 2018, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photo by Frazer Bradshaw. — Tavares Strachan, *Six Thousand Years*, 2018, © Tavares Strachan, courtesy of the artist and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photo by Frazer Bradshaw.

The exhibition presents more than twenty works, including the evocative Six Thousand Years series, which documents thousands of forgotten or overlooked people, events, and stories. Across sculpture, painting, text, and music, Strachan creates immersive environments that blend everyday spaces with surreal landscapes. These works excavate histories often omitted from mainstream narratives, particularly those of the Black diaspora, inviting viewers to reconsider how we see, record, and honor the past. Investigating astronomy, climatology, and other scientific fields, Strachan tells stories of cultural displacement and societal change.

Science is both Strachan’s medium and subject. The Bahamas Air and Sea Exploration Center, which Strachan founded in 2008, exemplifies this approach on a community scale. It connects children to visiting artists and scientists through hands-on research—an early iteration of the investigative methods and environmental storytelling realized in Six Thousand Years.

Visitors to the exhibition, curated by Diana Nawi, encounter spaces where history, science, and artistic experimentation converge, experiences that challenge perception and spark curiosity. The Day Tomorrow Began affirms the spirit once celebrated by the Frontier Art Prize: a vision of interdisciplinary creativity and the power of art and science to illuminate histories, communities, and possibilities often overlooked.

—J. D. Talasek