Hey LA:

I’m culture writer Carolina A. Miranda and I’m still battling the dregs of my flu. But I’ve made the most of my downtime by watching Henry Louis Gates’s fascinating PBS series, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War — covering a period that bears many uncanny echoes to our current era. Heartily recommend.

I’ll be peeling myself off the couch to check LA writer Sam Sweet’s talk at the Philosophical Research Society on November 5th (tomorrow!). I am a fan of his All Night Menu Questionnaire interviews, which record LA’s lesser-known cultural histories. Be sure to check out the book he helped bring to life: actor Candy Clark’s Tight Heads, a collection of her Polaroids that capture the informality of ‘70s-era Hollywood.

Plus: Back in April, I wrote about my wonderful field trip to artist Daniel Hawkins’ Desert Lighthouse in the Mojave. On November 15th, he is leading another!

Other things I am obsessing over:

• Contributor Leigh-Ann Jackson’s journey through the erudite worlds of Tavares Strachan 
• The Louvre heist!
• Artificial Intelligence Art English

At top is an installation view of Tavares Strachan's 2018 sculpture Robert, currently on view in the artist's solo show at LACMA, The Day Tomorrow Began. (Jonty Wilde / Tavares Strachan)

CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
by Leigh-Ann Jackson

Tavares Strachan, Six Thousand Years, 2018. (Frazer Bradshaw / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

Walking into The Day Tomorrow Began at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art feels like falling headlong down a rabbit hole. You’re immediately immersed in the myriad fascinations and fixations floating inside the mind of Bahamas-born multimedia artist Tavares Strachan. It’s a heady, multisensory experience, something like how Charlie must have felt when he entered Willy Wonka’s factory — only swap snozzberry wallpaper for wall-to-wall scientific and cultural marvels. 

The exhibition is divided into seven themed spaces, the first of which is The Encyclopedia Room. At its center, encased in glass, is a leatherbound tome, The Encyclopedia of Invisibility. The massive book, five years in the making, is said to contain more than 17,000 entries focusing on people, places, objects, and phenomena that Strachan feels haven’t received their due. Surrounding the case is Six Thousand Years, a dizzying collage covering every inch of wall with reproduced pages from the book. 

Enlarged images and dates are layered on top of the pages in an intentionally chaotic style reminiscent of a zine. Portraits of pioneers such as Black aviator Bessie Coleman, civil rights activist Claudette Colvin, and “Back to Africa” leader Marcus Garvey are superimposed in seemingly random spots. There are blown-up photos of Egyptian sarcophagi, as well as patent drawings of inventions ranging from basketball shoes to a fire escape ladder, all splashed over an encyclopedic synopsis of Ralph Ellison’s searing 1952 novel Invisible Man, or a brief bio of UK reggae legend DJ Derek.

In the foreground: Strachan's Encyclopedia of Invisibility, 2018. (Johnna Arnold / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

Strachan is a sci-fi head. There are passages dedicated to the classic film Forbidden Planet, various comic books, as well as “Bellamy, Simon” from the British superpower series Misfits. (As a fan of this relatively obscure TV show — and that character in particular — stumbling across this entry made me squeal with delight.) He’s also a hard science enthusiast: brainiac subjects such as the Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment and the Higgs boson particle are prominently featured throughout the show.

I lost track of how long I stayed there, then had to sit down and reset my buzzing brain. As I crossed into an adjacent gallery, an installation titled The Barbershop, I inadvertently blurted out, “Wait, there’s more?!” The jet black room, with its barber chairs, mirrors, and sinks, traces the link between traditional African hairstyles, early 20th-century African-American beauty products, such as pomade and hot comb oil, and the modern-day Black barbershop as community hub and haven.

This room resonated with me because I’d seen Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at the Mark Taper Forum two days prior. The production, set in a Harlem salon, explores the diasporic link between a group of pan-African immigrant stylists and their American clientele. Together, the two works speak to the ways in which Black hair shops represent so much more than just a utilitarian place to get a trim or a new ‘do. (Speaking of overlap, Strachan’s exhibition shares a common thread with the Derek Fordjour show I covered in September. Both prominently feature scene-stealing live activations … but that’s all I’ll say about it, as Strachan requested spoiler-free coverage of that portion.)

 
A Map of the Crown (Amasunzu Black), from 2023, is one of the works that appears in Strachan's Black barbershop installation. (Jonty Wilde / Tavares Strachan)

Beyond the barbershop, there were still other histories to uncover as I navigated Strachan’s sequence of meticulous installations. Pressing on, I found more unsung heroes on display — astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, or deep-sea diver Andrea Motley Crabtree. Their likenesses are rendered in handwoven tapestry, neon lights, and fantastical ceramic busts nestled above billowing tufts of dried rice grass.

Monument Hall is where you’ll find the most arresting examples of Strachan’s mission — shedding light on “subjects that have been left out of or erased from mainstream narratives.” The six bronze monuments that make up the In Praise of Midnight series flip the script on who’s deemed historically important and worthy of commemoration. In each topsy-turvy statue, a notable public figure appears upside-down beneath a comparatively lesser-known individual who’s sitting right-side-up. In the center of the room, a towering statue of Haitian revolutionary King Henri Christophe straddles his steed while Napoleon Bonaparte teeters below. Nearby, Arctic explorer Matthew Henson overtakes his expedition commander, Robert Peary.

This series is beyond timely. The Trump administration is reinstalling controversial Confederate statues, and the MONUMENTS exhibition at MOCA and The Brick, with its reconfigured depictions of decommissioned public statues, recently rolled into L.A. 

 
Galaxy Defender, 2025, depicts pioneering deep sea diver Andrea Motley Crabtree. (Jonty Wilde / Tavares Strachan)

Near the end of Strachan’s mind-expanding maze is The Wash House, a monochromatic laundromat complete with vending machines and functioning dryers. On top of washers and folding tables are various faux cleaning products bearing tongue-in-cheek ad speak like, “scrubs away nuance,” “removes grime, gloss and memory,” and “dilute before use — truth too strong otherwise.” On the pale gray walls are numerous signs from “management,” including the Wonka-esque: “Please do not allow life to crush your children’s imagination. Thank you.” 

Strachan’s flair for satire, his seemingly boundless curiosity, and his unconventional ways of preserving and honoring the past all make for a show that’ll have you re-examining what — and who — you’ve been taught to recognize and revere. 

AROUND THE INTERNET 

It’s Carolina! I’ll be taking it from here…

• The WeHo reveler who won Halloween.
• Police in France have arrested four suspects in the Louvre heist, but one person may still be on the lam.
• The New York Times has a blow-by-blow on how the theft went down.
• The L.A. Times’ Jessica Gelt wonders if a Louvre-like heist could happen in LA.
• Meanwhile, more than 1,000 items were stolen from an off-site storage facility belonging to the Oakland Museum of California.
• Photos show a beloved Bay Area bronze sculpture being carted off from a San Jose park. 
• Workers at LACMA have announced plans to unionize.
• Fluxus artist Alison Knowles has died at the age of 92.
• Nigerian Nobel winner Wole Soyinka says the U.S. has revoked his visa, possibly due to his criticisms of  Trump.
• Trump has fired all six members of the commission in charge of reviewing his beloved ballroom plans.
• Signing off with a must-read by Andrew Berardini on the scourge of AI art writing.
  

Thank you for reading! 🙏

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