Artist Tavares Strachan's Living History Installation, Bar Room, Brings Area's Raggae Roots to Life at Columbus Museum of Art

Step inside the Columbus Museum of Art at The Pizzuti’s newest permanent installation, Bar Room, and the first thing you notice isn’t a painting or a sculpture—it’s the hum of conversation, the clink of glasses, the aroma of freshly roasted coffee. This is no ordinary gallery. “Part installation, part archive, part neighborhood hangout, Bar Room celebrates Columbus’s reggae roots and the role of African-diasporic and Afro-Caribbean communities in shaping our cultural and culinary life. What I love about Bar Room is that it opens up the idea of what a museum can be.” says Brooke Minto, Executive Director.  Conceived by Bahamian conceptual artist Tavares Strachan, Bar Room transforms one of The Pizzuti’s spaces into a fully operational rum bar and billiards hall, a living artwork that merges hospitality, history, and memory into a single immersive experience. 

Equal parts sculpture, social experiment, and cultural archive, Bar Room invites visitors to slow down, linger, and engage. Here, a sip of cane-based rum or a cup of locally roasted Ethiopian coffee becomes more than refreshment—it’s a connection to stories, migrations, and traditions. Food and drink are some of the biggest signifiers of belonging. Culture is how we spend our time, and these flavors and spirits are extensions of our stories, migrations, and rituals. When we taste them we’re connecting to something larger than ourselves.”

Everything humans know is tied to how we eat and drink. There’s no life without it. Food has always been the story of survival, memory, and invention. Bar Room is a celebration of that continuity, a reminder that knowledge can live in taste, in scent, in the shared act of nourishment.

Strachan’s work has long explored the intersections of art, science, and cultural inquiry, delving into what gets remembered (or erased) in history. Themes of invisibility, displacement, and resilience are central to his practice, and Bar Room continues this exploration by reclaiming spaces that are often overlooked: communal gathering spots. “I hope people leave feeling they’ve stepped into a living history of safe spaces: places where people have gathered to feel seen and to protect one another,” he says.

Originally conceived for a 2022 solo exhibition in New York, Bar Room had never been publicly photographed or commercially operational. The Columbus Museum of Art has now reworked the installation, turning it into a functioning cafe and bar with bespoke cocktails, curated food, and even neon sculptures celebrating reggae music. Jackson Proctor, a veteran of Columbus’ hospitality scene, oversees the beverage program, ensuring that every drink—whether rum-forward or coffee-based—reflects Strachan’s vision and the cultural history embedded in the space.

For Strachan, the installation is more than a bar. It’s a meditation on the ways communal spaces sustain culture. “There is no culture without community,” he says. “Spending time together, talking, laughing, arguing, listening—that’s how we create meaning and remember who we are.” In that sense, the museum itself becomes a kind of “public kitchen,” a space where ideas, tastes, and stories circulate freely, uniting art, conversation, and hospitality under one roof.

Ultimately, Bar Room is designed to evolve. “Museums have to change with the times. They were originally built to serve the bourgeoisie, and a part of that old obsession with collecting and displaying trophies of the empire. A museum should be a place to grow, to feel connected, to share in a living culture rather than just observe it. It should always feel alive, like culture itself, feeding and being fed by those who gather inside it,” Strachan notes. “Here, the act of eating, drinking, and lingering becomes an artistic and cultural practice, a way of tasting history, belonging, and sharing collective memory.”

In a city increasingly alive with ambitious, globally relevant ideas, Bar Room offers a radical proposition: a museum not just as a place to view art, but as a space to live it, sip it, talk about it, and share it.