Tavares Strachan: Starless Midnight
Marian Goodman Gallery
385 Broadway New York, NY 10013
7 March – 19 April 2025
Tavares Strachan’s Starless Midnight at Marian Goodman Gallery is an ambitious, deeply layered exhibition that transforms history, science, and personal mythology into an immersive experience. Strachan, known for his conceptually rigorous and materially diverse practice, has once again created a world where the past and present converge, where historical erasure is met with radical visibility. The show is a testament to his ability to stitch together disparate elements—ceramic, neon, rice fields, and sound—into a visual language that speaks to resilience, invisibility, and survival.
On the first floor, The Birth of Exuma (Eagle Talon), 2024, commands attention. A near-life-sized ceramic figure of musician and artist Exuma stands at the center of a lush rice field, its layout shaped by the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol Okodee Mmowere, meaning “eagle’s talons.” This is not just an homage but a portal: Exuma, with his folkloric Bahamian mysticism, becomes a shamanic presence. The surrounding rice, a global sustenance crop, binds histories of labor, migration, and cultural inheritance. Above, a neon quote from James Baldwin pulses in sync with a dissonant soundscape, threading together identity, language, and struggle. Strachan transforms materials into metaphors, and here, survival is both conceptual and literal—the rice that feeds, the eagle’s talon that defends.
Upstairs, Strachan shifts to language as a material in a series of intricate, hand-tiled paintings doubling as word searches. Unlike the grounded, ritualistic nature of The Birth of Exuma, these works vibrate with cerebral intensity. The letters appear fragmented, almost disintegrating, evoking the precarious nature of historical narratives—who writes them, who reads them, who disappears between the lines. These pieces, recalling the flickering uncertainty of CRT screens, collapse technological nostalgia into a meditation on knowledge and power. Like electromagnetic static, they hover on the edge of comprehension, forcing the viewer into an archaeological act of reading.
Strachan’s ability to merge the cosmic and the personal, the archival and the speculative, is at its most poignant in this exhibition. His ongoing Encyclopedia of Invisibility project seeps into every corner of Starless Midnight, making visible those histories, figures, and languages that institutions so often overlook. In doing so, he doesn’t just retrieve lost stories—he reframes them as essential.
At Marian Goodman, Strachan continues to push the boundaries of installation and conceptual storytelling, creating a visual and sensory lexicon that insists on being seen, heard, and, most importantly, remembered. Starless Midnight is a poetic excavation of the past and a resolute declaration of presence.
