Apr 23, 2023
Updated: May 7, 2023
After an expedition to the North Pole in 1999, conceptual artist Tavares Strachan began studying unknown African American polar explorer Matthew Henson - but whose contributions were lost to history. Henson accompanied Robert Peary when they claimed they reached the North Pole 1909.
Then, when Strachan’s community in the Bahamas received its first set of encyclopedias, the first person he looked for within the tomes was his personal hero: Henson. When he didn’t find the explorer within the pages, he started to realize: No one from his community was in there, either. “And if they were missing,” he pondered on stage in Vancouver last week at TED2023, “What else was lost?”
So, Strachan began developing his own encyclopedia, which he calls The Encyclopedia of Invisibility. It's a handsome 3,000-page, leather-bound book with over 17,000 entries, focused on historically marginalized individuals, places, and events. It was created over the course of 12 years, together with a team of researchers and explorers who “combed the globe” to find “people, places, and things that were mostly untold.”
The encyclopedia aims to include the kinds of things you may never learn about in school.
The first entry, of course, is on Henson, but Strachan also highlighted entries like those that tell the story of Minos, one of history’s only documented all-female armies; Sister Rosette Tharpe, the godmother of rock n’ roll; and Robert Smalls, who freed a ship of enslaved people and later became the first Black congressman in the U.S. Indeed, a U.S. Navy ship once named after a Confederate victory has just been renamed after Smalls. The USS Chancellorsville is now the USS Robert Smalls.
“My work became a quest to tell these lost stories,” Strachan said in his TED talk.
Strachan's endeavour is similar to that of Jess Wade - a British physicist who has been on a mission to address the issue of 'missing' female scientists. She has written 1,750 Wikipedia bios for these overlooked women scientists to redress the balance. ‘Not only do we not have enough women in science, but we aren’t doing enough to celebrate the ones we have,’ she told the Washington Post.
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