Tavares Strachan. The Barber Shop.

A barbershop inside a museum

The Barber Shop is an installation Tavares Strachan made in 2025. The room holds barber chairs, tall mirrors and a television. On the walls hang paintings made of flocked hair, the Mind Field series, depicting tightly coiled hair of the kind known as 4C. Beside them stand bronze busts from the series A Map of the Crown, their hair elaborately styled.

The television shows a game being played on the UNIA Tea Room chess set, another of Strachan's works, whose resin pieces carry the figures and names of Black thinkers, Marcus Garvey among them.

But before all of this comes the smell. As Chenoa Baker writes in The Brooklyn Rail, the clean vanilla scent of oil sheen, the shine spray familiar from Black hair care, reaches visitors before they enter. The smell stirs the body's memory before the eye has registered a barbershop.

Anyone who has sat in such a chair knows at once. Anyone who has not knows they are entering a place with its own codes, its own smell, and people who have been there a long time.

The barbershop as archive

In many Black communities the barbershop is not only for haircuts. It is a place for stories, arguments, news and teaching. People come for a cut and stay to listen. The knowledge here is not in books; it is in conversations repeated every week.

Strachan builds The Barber Shop as a place of storytelling. Busts and hair paintings placed together tie the craft of hair to a whole world of images about care and community. The chess game on the screen brings the names of thinkers into the everyday air of the shop.

What stands out is how smell is used. It does not illustrate the room. It arrives before the room. It turns remembering itself into an archive: what is kept is not paper but the body's reflex on meeting a familiar smell again.

Museums rarely have space for this kind of archive. Museums keep objects. The Barber Shop keeps what lies between objects and people: the air of a place.

Another encyclopedia

The Barber Shop is part of The Day Tomorrow Began, Strachan's first major museum exhibition, at the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti in Columbus, Ohio, from 16 May 2026 to 3 January 2027. Co-organised with LACMA, it gathers nearly a decade of sculpture, painting, neon text and music.

Strachan is a Bahamian artist. For years he has worked with one large idea: the people and knowledge that official history leaves out. The Encyclopedia of Invisibility, 2018, is an encyclopedia of exactly those.

The Columbus show unfolds as an alternative encyclopedia, each room asking who writes history, science and philosophy. One room holds a Ugandan amadinda that plays itself. Another holds a ceramic sculpture topped with the head of Marcus Garvey. And there is a barbershop.

In an encyclopedia, The Barber Shop is the one entry read first with the nose. It sits near other works that use body care materials to speak of the self, such as the soap and chocolate busts of Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather. In both, a head is cast again, and the smell of care comes with it.