Tavares Strachan. The Day Tomorrow Began: Reimagining Black Diaspora at LACMA

This fall, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will open a landmark exhibition, Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, running from October 12th, 2025 through March 29th, 2026 in BCAM, Level 2. The project marks the artist’s first major museum show in Los Angeles and is already being hailed as a centerpiece of Los Angeles art shows 2025. Bringing together more than 20 new works, including Strachan’s largest neon to date and monumental sculpture, the exhibition probes the overlooked narratives of the Black diaspora, reframing how histories are remembered, represented, and commemorated.

Curated by Diana Nawi, LACMA’s Curator of Contemporary Art, and co-organized with the Columbus Museum of Art, The Day Tomorrow Began immerses visitors in a multi-sensory environment where sculpture, painting, text, and sound converge. Strachan invites audiences to question whose stories are written into dominant cultural memory and whose are left invisible. Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO, emphasized that the exhibition challenges institutions to engage with Black diasporic histories in deeper, more expansive ways.

Exploring diasporic histories through art

Among the highlights is Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2018), a 2,000-page tome that compiles over 17,000 entries on people, places, and events absent from mainstream archives. By reimagining the encyclopedia, Strachan exposes the fragility and bias inherent in the act of recording history.

Another major focus is his space-inspired works, including ENOCH (2018), a sculptural canopic jar dedicated to Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first Black astronaut in the United States. Developed in collaboration with SpaceX through LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, the artwork was launched into orbit in 2018, orbiting Earth for three years before its return. Here, Strachan entwines scientific ambition with cultural erasure, restoring visibility to a figure largely absent from public memory.

A new monumental neon installation, reflecting on parallel quotes from James Baldwin and Mark Twain, takes on human aspiration and shared potential, creating an interplay between light, language, and philosophy. These works—together with new bronzes questioning the politics of public monuments—underscore Strachan’s ability to merge history, identity, and future possibility.

Beyond the galleries

The exhibition’s publication extends Strachan’s practice of annotation, pairing interviews, personal writings, and unexpected voices—ranging from the artist’s mother to Junkanoo leaders in Nassau—with reflections on monuments and memory. Far from a traditional catalogue, it acts as an evolving document of cultural exchange.

Born in Nassau, Bahamas, Strachan has long explored the intersections of art, science, and politics. His trajectory spans major projects such as Human Flow and his satellite ENOCH, placing him at the forefront of artists reshaping how we think about the past, present, and future.

With Tavares Strachan: The Day Tomorrow Began, Tavares Strachan has created an exhibition that pushes beyond aesthetics into urgent questions of visibility and remembrance. As part of the museum’s decade-long Hyundai Project partnership, this ambitious presentation cements Strachan’s role as one of the most vital voices examining diasporic histories today.

Spacial thanks to CULTURAL COUNSEL